Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Introduction

            This week’s review will be of...

Food falling from outside the window, but ignore that.

            Cook, Serve, Delicious is an indie game with multiple game elements taken from multiple genres. These genres include action, simulation and strategy, making this game a tri-brid game… YES TRI-BRID. 

            The core mechanics of the game involves the player managing a restaurant (the simulation part), setting the daily menus (the strategy part), through day shifts of the player working from 9am to 10pm every day doing every possible position in the restaurant (the action(?) part) by themselves. 

No caption needed. Wait...

            Players start off as being introduced into a 1-star restaurant within a hotel, and is tasked to work their way up to becoming a 5-star restaurant. The only way the player can advance up the ranks is by completing goals set by the game (e.g. passing health inspection tests from a health inspector that stares into your soul). 

            The food the player can possibly have on the menu is 5 at the start, this increase to 6 when the player progresses through the game. These 6 (eventually) slots can be filled up with foods and drinks, ranging from the humble commoner food called pretzel to the destroy-their-wallet only-for-the-rich-and-classy 5-star lobster. Basically, selling the food is the player’s main source of income (duh!). 

The menu of nicely drawn food

             Money in the game is used to purchase upgrades and kitchen equipment such as fryers, which unlocks certain foods for purchase. Oh yeah, and food must be bought before they can be put on the menu (my middle name is Obvious).

            The main gameplay involves the player working a day shift from 9am to 10pm; the days generally last 15 minutes give or take in real-time. And in these 15 minutes is where you, the player, single-handedly run the restaurant: take orders, make the food, cook the food, throw the trash, set rat traps, and flush toilets. The part that varies the most and is not always the same day in day out is the food itself. A pretzel’s preparation is as simple as dunking well-shaped flour into a tub of hot oil for 5 seconds, while preparing something like a steak takes somewhere around… forever.

 

The pains of a 4-star restaurant

            Okay, enough with the introduction let’s go into deep-fried analysis, get it get it get it?

What makes this game sizzling hot!

Fast-paced

            The reason why this game is highly addictive at the start is because the game is extremely good at throwing you many tasks and challenges, and these tasks and challenges are not particularly challenging (pun intended) or difficult. These tasks refer to taking orders of someone’s favorite fried chicken, while cooking someone’s fish, while throwing out the trash, while trying to draw a robber’s face… you get the idea.

Same picture but.. an example of the amount of things you have to do as self-employed CEO

Reasonable amount of variety

            You would think for a fast-paced, action-packed game that variety in terms of foods would be limited… nope! With 30 foods on offer for purchase, the variety and how you can mix up your menu every day is limitless, of course, if you have money to purchase them in the first place. 

The amount of food on offer, its greyed out but just wanted to give an idea.

These foods all come with multiple upgrades as well, with a few having no upgrades whatsoever (poor commoner food pretzel), these upgrades usually make the food slightly more difficult to make by adding new recipes that every customer that comes in can possibly ask for… Soup is a killer just a heads-up.

Holy hearty meat soup

Side-activities such as catering events and Iron Chef shows will also help to keep you entertained playing the game.

Easy to learn, hard to master

            Everything in the game is easy to pick up. The pace is set right because when the player is at 1-star, the customers slowly trickle in, allowing the player to get used to the game mechanics and understand their purpose. This difficulty then slowly starts to scale from 2-star which has slightly more people coming in to 5-star where people literally swarm to your restaurant even when it’s not rush hour.

            In conclusion, this good pacing lends itself to the game being easy to pick up for beginners, and because of the scaling difficulty, it makes the game extremely challenging to master for those who have surpassed the beginner-stage. 

What makes this game sizzling bad!

Grinding

            The addictive factor of this game does start to deteriorate as the player starts to keep playing and playing. The days get longer because of more customers, the orders get more complicated and soon all the chores start piling on; and for a perfectionist like me who loves it when I manage to attain a perfect day (not messing up any orders), it is an epic pain in the arse when I have to restart the day because of screw-ups. Maybe it’s because I suck at micromanagement… BUT I DIGRESS.

In conclusion, the game soon turns into a grind-fest to reach the next star, which is a minimum of 20 days of service with all the goals, this is especially the case around 3-star and up. The first two stars of gameplay are reasonably fun to play in my opinion.

OVERALL

Gameplay: A-, fun, fast-paced gameplay at the beginning that may result in a grind-fest to some.

Graphics: B, simple graphics that are refined and polished.

Depth: C+, not much depth to speak of besides the 30 foods that exist and the way they are prepared.

Animation: B-, simple animations of food preparation and people with not much to talk about.

Replayability: B+, definitely present, but differs to many people.

Learnability: A+, easy to pick up and learn, but hard to master.

OVERALL: B+, a simplistic arcade-ish kind of game that rewards players with good micromanagement and memory. 

Summary

            At 9.99USD on Steam as of writing, this game is definitely worth the money spent in my opinion. The fast-paced action and context of the game would definitely get most people hooked at the start, but whether or not you stay on through all 5-stars of this restaurant simulation (I know I didn’t), it is all up to you and the 30 foods at your disposal. 

            Shoutout to all those people who have been supporting me since the start of this and everyone else! Thank you for reading and see you next week and until then, adios!

Clearly an unused image to close off