Streetfood Tycoon: World Tour is a pretty repetitive game and yet it's also a game that has kept me bizarrely hooked since I started playing it. That's a common problem with time management games. By their very nature, they have to be quite repetitive and yet often, such predictability cocoons the player into carrying on for much longer than one would expect.
Players start out by choosing somewhere to set up shop, or stall in this case, before trying to raise more money to expand their food selling empire across the world. Whether players start out, the idea is the same. On screen is a selection of food and containers, with customers appearing requesting certain items. It's then down to the player to tap on the relevant container, food item and sauce before dragging it up to present to the customer. This carries on for the length of the in game working day, which works out as only around a minute. Other conundrums emerge such as the need to keep the stall clean and increasingly demanding customers, but the core ideal is the same.
It's repetitive yet oddly satisfying. At the end of each day, the money accrued can be spent on upgrades and other bonuses, thereby enabling the player to earn even more money during future days. It's possible to circumvent this by buying money with an in-app purchase. This would certainly speed things up but also somewhat ruin the point of the game.
Streetfood Tycoon: World Tour doesn't evolve a huge amount beyond these core concepts, even though it does throw in frivolous extras such as the presence of celebrities. Play it for 30 minutes or 3 hours and it'll still be mostly the same. And yet, I still find myself going back for more, which isn't bad going at all for a free to play game.