Gunman Taco Truck review
:: CARNAGE ASADAPrice: Free
Version: 1.1.5
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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Gunman Taco Truck is a rather unassuming-looking roguelike if it weren't for the pedigree behind it. Romero Games is headed up by John Romero, one of the minds behind classics like DOOM and Quake. With this lineage in mind, Gunman Taco Truck–while pretty interesting–has a lot of annoying quirks to it that keep it from being as good as it should be.
Killer tacos
In Gunman Taco Truck, you play as a taco truck vendor in a post-apocalyptic world full of giant ants, mutated lions, and hungry survivors. Your mission is to use your taco truck as a weapon, business, and mode of transportation to make it up to Canada where the apocalypse is not supposed to be quite as bad.
As a taco vendor, you'll need to make sure you can cook up tacos to earn money so you can afford the cost of gas to keep driving. You'll also need to earn currency to outfit your truck with new weapons and armor as well as make sure you don't run out of ingredients to make tacos. If you run out of gas or your taco truck is taken down by enemies, your journey ends and you have to start all over again.
Tres gameplays
Because of the amount of things you need to do in the game, Gunman Taco Truck is split up into three distinct parts. There's the driving portion, where you switch between lanes of the road while shooting enemies, animals, and other parts of the environment to get ingredients and scrap while trying to stay alive. These sections end after the required distance has been covered and leads to a management phase where you can refuel and shop before cooking or moving on your way. Finally, there's the cooking part of the game where you combine ingredients to satisfy customers and try to maximize your profits.
All of these sections are relatively simple to control, with driving consisting of swiping to change lanes and tapping to shoot, shopping being all menu-based, and the cooking requiring some simple swipes to get ingredients onto a taco before wrapping and delivering it to a customer. The further in the game you get though, Gunman Taco Truck throws some curveballs in the mix with new enemy types, more expensive gas, new recipes, and even customers with custom orders.
Food wasteland
The balance of the three systems in Gunman Taco Truck feel like they should work on paper, but they almost always fall apart in practice. As a roguelike, this game throws in a fair amount of randomness, but the degree to which this game requires players to get lucky to succeed takes a lot of satisfaction out of playing the game. Even when playing on the Easy difficulty setting, you'll drive to a store to find that it has none of the things you need to earn money you need for gas, which essentially strands you.
In addition to this, Gunman Taco Truck's cooking gameplay relies heavily on players memorizing recipes so they can get tips for making tacos fast. It's an interesting system that rewards player dedication to memorization, but if you're not up for that, it just means you'll have to flip through a recipe book a bunch to look things up, which is not a fun thing to do.
Finally, it's also worth noting that Gunman Taco Truck is a free-to-try game instead of actually free-to-play. If you play the game without paying, you'll get a pop-up asking for $0.99 to unlock the full game once you get a few stops into the game. If you don't pay, you can't keep playing.
The bottom line
Gunman Taco Truck has a certain charm to its concept and gameplay structure, but its component parts end up feeling too disparate and random to be compelling. This, combined with some weird gameplay quirks, make it hard to stick with the game for too terribly long.