At first glance Burrito Bison might seem like such an unusual assortment of genres and themes, and rightly so. The uniquity of luchadores facing off against an army of gummy bears in a side scrolling combat RPG is not lost on me and yet, for all of its oddity, this game has followed me from my early school years to my apparently more mature years and has always been worryingly addictive. Run-based games such as this have a great ability to draw you in to spending your big payouts on nifty new abilities which absolutely have to be tested out right away. Needless to say, I probably sunk way too many hours into this game… the poor AAA titles never stood a chance.
Platforms and Languages – 5/10
Burrito Bison is a mobile exclusive and is completely free to download from the app store on Apple or Android. If you are so inclined you can also play the original flash versions online at a number of flash game sites however the language options are more limited. For this iteration a good number of languages are available from the shop screen including Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
Glossary
Usability – 4/10
Burrito Bison isn’t the wordiest of games out there. I wouldn’t like to stereotype but wasn’t expecting a game about shirtless cartoon luchadores to contain an undulating narrative. What Burrito Bison does provide however is a healthy amount of repeatable vocabulary as well as a touch of humour and good, physics based terminology. While there is a story to the game this is rarely shown and appears as wordless comic strips of Burrito’s altercations with the Cookinator. The bulk of your time and one of the best resources for language learning here is the shop. After each run you will be able to invest your coins in a number of upgrades for your play, the special gummy bears, bosses and usable items. Each one comes with a brief description of what it does and, once purchased, a breakdown of what each improvement will provide. Some of these are quite quippy whereas other are more to the point and provide information on speeds, durations and rewards.
The next most prevalent feature is the various pop-ups you receive as you progress and the missions to achieve during each launch. The notifications you get as you unlock items are few and far between. It may be a matter of minutes at the earlier levels but as you start warping through time (spoilers!) they become rarer and more repetitive. The text boxes are relatively small and digestible however they come with the drawback that they cannot be brought up on the screen at any time. Once you have reviewed and progressed a notification you won’t be able to revise it again (Aside from the countless, countless pinata pop-ups…). While launching towards the cake walls you are given up to 3 tasks to complete in order to gather more sweet shards. These are typically only a line of text but, aside from the small image acting as a hint, you must rely on your understanding (or dumb luck) in order to complete them. These missions rotate frequently and are little to no trouble to read for a beginner.
The volume of text throughout Burrito Bison is small comparable to the gameplay elements however the end game features a new selection of stores, menus and unlockable content that in some way revitalise the reading experience. With a new form of currency you can purchase more absurd upgrades in the ???? store and if you save up your recipe scraps you can be rewarded with real life, usable Mexican recipes. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this as it’s not often you get something out of a game that has real world implications. The recipes themselves look tasty, which is a bonus, but the best advantage is a new genre of text. I’ve always found that recipes are a great tool for language learning as they use aspects like measurement and quantity, different types of verbs and instructive grammar. The only downside here is it takes an awful lot of gummy bear killing to unlock the recipes and there’s only 4 in total!
All in all, Burrito Bison could be considered more detrimental to a studying mentality than beneficial. It’s remarkably easy to get absorbed in run after run and lose hours of your time, however, this isn’t necessarily a nail in the coffin for my views on its usability. If you have a N3 reading level or higher I would say that Burrito Bison is not going to be worth investing your time into, perhaps just a short stint to pick up some potentially new words. What I would say is that, if you are a beginner, this game may be a less intensive venture and maybe a good gateway game into trying games in a different language. The period of time between readable sections is not incredibly long but long enough that it takes away from any realistically useful study session. I think this is one for the commutes at best, sorry Burrito.
Challenges and Methods – 5/10
The new Cookinator
For the lack of databases and lists in Burrito Bison the recipes section more than make up for it. As I say above, recipes are incredibly effective at building a wide variety of knowledge and of all of the sections available these are the wordiest. No other unlock in the game feels as worth your efforts than this so try your best to unlock all 4, write them out if possible and, if you really want, cook them yourselves as a well deserved reward.
Have you got the skills
It makes sense that if the skills in the shop are the thing you’ll see the most then it’s best to learn them well. Either at the start of your run, or once you’ve had chance to familiarise yourself with the mechanics of each item, try to invest the time needed into learning all of the vocab. The language is limited meaning you can easily practice to the point where you can remember all of the words used. Try to write them out, speak them aloud or apply your own study methods to master them all.
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