Garfield's Diner Review

Garfield's Diner is a free time management game app available on both iTunes and Google Play (formerly Android Market) to celebrate Garfield's 34th birthday. It's summertime and Irma is off to Hawaii on vacation. She manages to convince Jon to take care of the diner while she is away. It's your job to help Jon and his friends to successfully run the diner and treat the customers to all of Irma's favorite dishes. The game is featured in multiple languages and has customized settings to change, for example, the music volume.

Because I own an Android device, I ended up playing the Android version, so this review is solely based off of that. I don't know if there are any differences between the Android and iTunes versions or if changes have been made after game updates.

The gameplay itself is simple enough. Wait for customers to come in through the door and then drag them to the respective food stations according to their thought bubbles. Tap on them again to serve them and, if they don't want anything else, you can go help them checkout. Each checkout will earn you a certain amount of money and happiness level. Make sure you serve each customer fast or they'll get angry and storm out of the diner without paying and decrease your happiness level by a significant amount. Each level or day also has its own goal, such as earning a set amount of money or serving a certain amount of customers, and accomplishing those goals will earn you rewards. However, if you fail to meet a goal, you will not be able to replay the level. Instead, you'll simply move onto the next level. Also, by dismissing the goal and restarting the game, you'll be able to get a new goal if you think the goal is unreachable.

Unfortunately, you'll most likely need to do this quite a number of times. While playing, I've noticed that often times the goal can be rather unreasonable at the current level. For example, on the first level, I was asked to earn 5000 coins, which I knew was almost impossible (I only earned about 100+ coins on the first level and this was without having any customers storm out on me.).

Along the way you'll be able to use the money that you earn to buy more stuff for your diner, whether that be more food stations, more seating, more characters to help out, or upgrade your items to provide faster serving time. You can also use Garfield Coins to purchase items. However, Garfield Coins are very limited and require you to use real money to purchase through the in-game store. While no one likes freemium games, the game would have been okay if the game did not rely so heavily on Garfield Coins. For example, almost all of the characters except for the default Jon and Doc Boy require you to use Garfield Coins to unlock. I can't even get Garfield without spending hundreds of Coins and he's supposed to be the star of the game! Every now and then you do have the ability to earn more Garfield Coins by completing achievements, but these achievements are either very hard to accomplish or will only grant you one Garfield Coin at a time. At the beginning of the game, I was given 50 free Garfield Coins. This allowed me to purchase Liz at 40 Coins but she moves extremely slowly. At the current pricing, you can buy 100 Garfield coins for $0.99.

Upgrading each item also requires a lot of money. You'll often need to play through several levels before you'll have enough money for an upgrade. Upgrading a character will make him or her walk faster. Upgrading a food station will not only increase the money earned from each dish served but also lessens the serving time. However, the time shortened is very incremental, for I have yet to see a significant increase after making an upgrade. If you're ever short of coins, you always have the option of converting your Garfield coins to in game money, but why you'll ever do that beats me. It would have been a lot better if I could convert the opposite way, turning my in-game money into Garfield Coins.

You can also purchase powerups. These powerups can either allow you to in a limited amount of time to earn more money, move faster, or allow your customers to have more patience. However, once you use up all your powerups you'll have to spend Garfield Coins to buy anymore.

Every now and then you'll also be able to collect Garfield cards. Each card contains a portrait of a Garfield character and a brief character description.

During each level, you can choose the game's speed in the upper left corner. Upping the speed will allow you to earn more money. The max speed you can set is 4 times the regular speed. The speed can be customized throughout the level so you won't have to worry about accidentally setting the speed too high when things start to get crazy. And believe me, things will start to go crazy. Customers have very short patience. It takes so long to serve one customer that it is too easy to have your customers run out in anger. Unfortunately, you can't queue your tasks, so it soon becomes a race against time as you randomly tap each customer because you don't know where your waiter is heading.

Throughout time, after reaching gathering a certain amount of money and happiness level, your diner will automatically upgrade to the next level. This will increase the difficulty of the game but you'll also have more customers and more opportunities to earn money.


On certain levels will be VP Day. Your usual assortment of adults, elderly, and children will now completely be replaced by the elderly. However, the nice thing about this day is that you can earn a lot of money on the level. Each customer will pay you an amount about 400 - 500+ so you'll quickly earn enough money for at least a couple of upgrades for that day. 


Graphics of the food stations can sometimes be very confusing as well. All along I thought that the blue dish that was supposed to be spaghetti was actually pie. The picture for drinks looks more like a baby bottle than a cup of soda. As a result, I couldn't stop laughing when my customers got angry because I wasn't able to serve them their drink fast enough.


Conclusion: While this game was interesting and fun at first, it quickly got boring. The requirement for Garfield Coins in order to unlock anything useful makes the game very limited. Goals can be unreasonable at times and most likely won't be achievable until the latter half of the game. This game can easily become a mass of confusion when it starts to get busy and the inability to queue tasks makes it hard to figure out which customers you're going to serve. The game also becomes repetitive extremely fast as few new things are introduced later in the game. However, the game does present a nice challenge for a Diner Dash-like time management game. 


I give this app four stars for the initial enjoyment but after adding all the other factors in, especially the game's attempt to force you to buy Garfield Coins and its inability to keep a lasting enjoyment, lowers the rating to three stars.