Tuesday, 02 July 2019 05:08

Cooking Simulator Review

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Edited by: John Gerritzen

Cooking Simulator, as you might have guessed from the title, is a cooking simulation game developed by Big Cheese Studio and published by PlayWay. In it, you take control of a restaurant kitchen and can cook dishes to your heart’s desire… or cause a fair bit of mayhem, whichever you prefer.

PICK YOUR POISON

You can choose to play Cooking Simulator a variety of ways. You can start out with cooking school, the title’s brief tutorial mode, and learn a few of the basics right off the bat, or you can jump right into career mode (the default mode when you start a new game), or play around in sandbox mode. Cooking school won’t teach you everything you need to know, but it’s a nice option to get familiar with the controls and mechanics.

BUILD YOUR REPUTATION

In career mode, you’re hired as a chef at a downtrodden restaurant with few customers and even less notoriety. The fate of the restaurant rests on your shoulders, as your cooking is the only thing able to attract food critics and increase the fame stars of the restaurant. This mode is the main course of Cooking Simulator and the only section that gives you tasks worth completing. As you serve dishes and increase your fame, you’re given skill points and perks to choose to invest in each time you level up. This provides a nice incentive to keep playing, as there are bigger and better perks to unlock to make your job easier, as well as new dishes to unlock and learn to make.

The pacing of career mode flows well, as gaining fame stars takes a satisfying amount of time and effort. If you’re eager to advance, however, you can adjust the pace through perks as well, such as through investing your skill points into a perk that allows you gain twenty, forty, or sixty percent more fame from each dish. The dishes themselves are also fun and pleasantly realistic to make, and while some are quite easy, others can prove to be a real challenge to finish on time, which creates a nice amount of variety overall. On the downside, you might find that making dishes can become slightly repetitive after a while and that there’s not much replay value once you unlock everything.

DESTROY THE KITCHEN

If you want to bypass unlocking the perks, recipes, and skills, you can hop into sandbox mode and play with everything the kitchen has to offer there. You can get ahead by practicing how to make complex recipes, or remodel the kitchen with all the customization options provided. If you’re feeling more mischievous, you can also play around with some of the things you might not want to do in career mode, such as turning on zero gravity or deep frying the gas canisters lying around (because who doesn’t want to blow up the kitchen?).

DEAL WITH BUGS

As fun as making dishes and blowing up the deep fryer are, Cooking Simulator, unfortunately, has quite a few bugs. The most notable problem is that the mouse has severe lag that pops up every few seconds of gameplay, which can make it feel impossible to hover over and pick up smaller ingredients, in turn making it harder to complete dishes in the time allotted. I also experienced a few more minor glitches, such as a trout getting stuck mid-air when trying to put it in the oven, or dealing with a pesky hamburger bun that kept glitching through the plate.

In addition to fixing the bugs, some of the mechanics are also in need of optimization. Tools like the spatula can feel wonky to use when trying to flip objects, and using some tools will lock your field of vision in place, which can make it hard to clean up everything if you’re using a tool like the sponge. While not necessarily a glitch or optimization issue, I also found it slightly disappointing that there isn’t a way for you to arrange items on a plate, meaning you can’t really jazz up the look of a finished dish or make it aesthetically pleasing to your tastes.

6

The Verdict: Good

Cooking Simulator is an entertaining simulation game that allows you to cook to your heart’s content without the real-life mess and can easily consume a few hours of your time, but does suffer from several glitches, can feel repetitive, and is in need of future optimizations. If you like cooking, enjoy the simulation genre, or have a hankering to blow some stuff up in the kitchen, this title is definitely worth checking out.

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Jade Swann

Jade Swann is an avid video game player and fiction writer. She loves getting lost in open-world RPG’s, making tough choices in story-driven games, and is a big fan of the horror genre. Some of her favorite games include Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Planet Coaster, and The Sims 4. When not immersed in the world of video games, she can be found reading, writing, or spending time with her very lazy Boston Terrier.

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