Get Frying With Chippy, A Chip Shop Simulator for iOS

The British chip shop: a national institution, a hazard to your health and now an deep-frying iOS simulator too. It sounds like a bizarre concept, but a quirky graphical style and addictive time-management mechanics make Chippy ($2.99) the perfect time-waster for your iPhone or iPad.

Fans of Cooking Mama for the Wii and Cook Serve Delicious for iOS should listen up, as well as anyone looking for another of those addictive quick-blast games to play when you’ve got 5 minutes to spare.

Chips Not Fries

The bubbling of deep-frying potatoes, the lingering smell of vinegar and news-paper clad bundles of greasy food. This is what makes the British chip shop experience, and Chippy manages to distill these vital elements into a $2.99 (£1.99) feast for the thumbs.

Available as a universal app for iPhone and iPad, Chippy takes the time-management genre and pokes a little fun at it. The aim of the game is simple: to ascend the 28 included reputation ranks to earn the title of best fish and chip shop. The more you play, the more reputation you will earn and the more your small business grows.

The aim of the game is rather simple – take orders, prepare food and serve customers. Your main task will be opening the freezer, dropping food into the deep fryer then serving it to your customers in the fastest time possible. There are plenty of other unlockables and problems to take care of along the way to keep you on your toes.

Leave food in the fryer too long and you’ll burn it, resulting in plumes of cartoony smoke filling your chip shop. Forget to batter the fish before putting it in the fryer and you’ll have to start over. Mess up an order or take too long and your customers will become visibly angry. It’s all very self-explanatory and there’s always a tutorial to show you exactly what you’ll need to do when new elements are introduced.

As you ascend the ranks you will earn new food, condiments and equipment for your kitchen. The developers have been quite inventive, and really tried to pack in some longevity. It feels like more than a few lunch times have been spent at the local chip shop studying the premises and sampling the delights.

Some early upgrades include a smelly bin (which emits flies when you have to use it), a fly swatter (which you have to hold to activate) and unhygienic customers (which you’ll want to serve quickly to keep the flies down). They really nailed “the experience” it seems.

Not A Bad Looker

The quirky graphics really make the game a treat to look at, and there are splashes of brilliance here and there. Chippy has a cheeky sense of humour, with sarcastic newspaper headlines (from none other than the “Morning Horn”) and challenges that encourage you to drown orders in salt.

At the risk of sounding formulaic, the sound in Chippy is really worth a mention. The game features a bouncy 8-bit soundtrack, which isn’t as out of place as it might seem. There’s absolutely no reliance on sound here, of course – if you want to play it sneakily in class or while your boss isn’t looking, it’s the perfect game. Each round of Chippy only takes a couple of minutes, which counts as a “day”.

It’s not all fun and games (well it is, but you’ll be timed) and true mastery of Chippy means keeping your cool under pressure. Chain up successful orders to score more points, unlock challenges and set your fastest times. You can make things slightly easier for yourself by frying up a few orders of fish and chips before you open for the day, but that doesn’t help too much when you’ve got 5 angry customers waiting for dinner.

At the end of each day you’ll be given a breakdown of your performance, with your average serve time, efficiency, calorie content and friends scores (data which is pulled from Game Centre). You’ll also see your current reputation increase.

One interesting little feature is the inclusion of CCTV mode, which records your progress and allows you to share it with friends. You can access this feature from the pause menu, accessed by tapping the clock in the top-right hand corner. This area also features a Watch tab which lets you see how fast everyone else can do it.

Cheap As Chips

You can’t buy fish and chips for £1.99 any more, and Chippy will last you longer without bringing you closer to heart disease in the process. If you’ve enjoyed the likes of Cook Serve Delicious and even repetitive arcade games like Ridiculous Fishing, then Chippy is right up your street.

It is repetitive, but with plenty to unlock the game feels well-paced. On the iPhone there’s plenty of space to avoid hitting the wrong things, and things only improve further on the iPad.

Download: Chippy ($2.99)

Have you played Chippy? Any other time-management or cooking-themed games we should check out? Let us know!