Cooking Fever

Daily rewards! Cash and/or gems for logging in (although after the most recent update you no longer get gems, you get ‘shards’ (portions of a gem)!)

The customers get angry SO quickly — it sounds silly but it really creates a sense of urgency & stress.

You purchase an upgrade to win a restaurant level — a few levels later you need to upgrade the item again (& again)

Not real money — you can spend ‘game cash’ at the casino (with the goals of winning gems). It’s very easy to run out of game cash and then use REAL LIFE MONEY to buy more cash &/or gems

Yes I once accidentally pressed ‘yes’ to a sudden pop-up that asked if I wanted to spend $$ to receive a ‘mystery box’.

Eventually, you need to pay for restaurant upgrades to win a restaurant level. To do this you need to pay with gems, but then have to ‘wait’ a certain number of hours to receive what you’ve paid for. If you use even more gems you get what you’ve paid for immediately (& thus finally win the level / stop losing)

See above. This game eventually becomes entirely pay to win / pay to play. Happens slowly.

Incredibly insidious. This is the most evil aspect of Cooking Fever — it sneaks up on you so slowly. I cannot believe it had me spending $2, $5, & then $15 at a time. Over & over. This is pay to win. After you win the first restaurant (challenging but doable & very fun) every other restaurant will require an increasing number of gem purchases to win. You can VERY easily spend hundreds of dollars on this game. If you don’t pay, you simply cannot win. It’s impossible. This is legitimately evil.

It’s not never-ending — I think there are 50 or so restaurant in the universe? But they become available faster than you can complete them (unless you spend a LOT of real money)

So much grinding. So much repetition. That’s all the game is — doing the same menial tasks faster & faster. But you can pay real money to make the grinding a lot easier.