While Cook, Serve, Delicious! was already one of my favourite games, small things about it left me wanting more. The food options were very limited, there was little variation between days, and progression boiled down to how many days you completed rather than your skill. Despite that, CSD! is so unique that it's hard to find other games like it.
I was incredibly hyped for Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! prior to release, but was put off by the changes to the formula. Recipes couldn't be carried out rapid-fire if you remembered the keys, you had to press a key to go to the next page of steps. The menus and level select were obtuse to the point where I had to click blindly to navigate. The preset menus of the restaurants were brilliant as scripted level sequences, but made it difficult to justify working in my own restaurant when that contract work felt like the 'real game'. Unlocking new foods felt incredibly slow. Serving more customers faster than ever was problematised by the need to still hit specific keys to start and serve orders, and that speed made slip ups way more common. The continuation of chores didn't mesh with the new rapidity. Customising the restaurant was cool but I was also inundated with cosmetic unlocks I didn't feel like using because, again, I didn't feel compelled to work in my own restaurant. I return to CSD frequently, but CSD2 felt like experiencing Icarus flying too close to the sun.
When I saw Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! was in Early Access I was delighted but hesitant to give it a shot having been disappointed before, but it has surpassed both CSD2 and CSD in terms of quality. The story is not on the same level as the likes of LISA or Disco Elysium, though it is serviceable and interesting (I definitely did some Wiki deepdiving to find out about The Blue War and what happened to Japan). The voice acting is cute and I still love the hums the customers make. I was surprised to find that the soundtrack was composed by the same artist as the previous games since the step up in production and general quality is incredible. CSD and CSD2 had good soundtracks to be sure, but CSD3 has bops that are stuck in my head and occupy my Spotify playlists.
The design of CSD3's gameplay is virtually without flaw, retaining the best aspects of the previous instalments with its own important and unique additions.
Chores are completely gone (unless you count clearing your service stations due to rot or the level ending - gotta hear that satisfying ka-chunk) meaning my cooking rhythm isn't interrupted by mashing the arrow keys while patience rapidly ticks down.
The new Auto Serve key allows the breakneck speed of CSD2 without the heartbreak of accidentally pushing the key for something you just started cooking. You're saved from the potential hearing damage that everything going off at once would cause since it quickly 'scrolls' through the available dishes for an intensely satisfying series of chimes. And it doesn't save you from having to complete a dish, it simply helps push out things that would normally require a simple key press. It's small in theory but it goes a long way towards maintaining the 'flow' of CSD. Making some of the more complicated dishes was hard enough without having to hunt down dishes ready to go.
One still has to navigate through pages of ingredients as in CSD2, but the removal of side dish juggling and addition of Auto Serve makes this is less stressful. You can also change the colors of the page indicators!
Delicious ratings are less of a hassle to collect as they simply replace your Great ratings once you hit a certain combo of perfect dishes - no more worrying about having side dishes prepped in your incredibly important Holding Stations.
Chill mode still makes you feel incredible for doing well and serves as a good set of low-shame training wheels while you learn the game or try out new recipes. For the first few regions of the game I stayed on Chill and didn't feel like I was 'wussing out' of the 'real' experience at all. Not getting Gold Medals (you're locked to Silver if you play on Chill) does mean some levels can't be accessed without playing on Standard at least a bit, but the plethora of levels means you can still progress through the story and the vast majority of the levels. Those tied behind Gold Medals are usually some of the hardest challenges in the game. The 'choose your own difficulty' manner of the CSD series' menu configurations means you could probably replicate similar circumstances on another level if you really wanted - I can't speak for how missing out on this small subset of content in an official capacity might feel for those unable to access it.
Unlike CSD and CSD2, it's not difficult to earn the game's currency, which means it's easy to unlock the foods you want, and it gets easier as you rack up more difficult and expensive foods. Decorations now serve as a sink for any remaining currency, though power players like myself barely have a dent put in our virtual wallets.
It's nice not having foods 'taken away' from you once you reach a certain point like in CSD, your access to food will remain. While each level presents certain menu categories, I assure you you'll be able to make Brownies again, whereas in CSD you will eventually make your last Corn Dog long before the game ends.
Upgrading your truck makes the game more manageable but also allows more difficult situations to be created through additional Holding/Prep Stations. For example, the upgrade which refreshes Holding Station freshness and gives you back some servings for finishing a stop lets you focus more on special orders but also incentivises more 'aggressive' play.
The food truck is absolutely genius when it comes to game pacing. In CSD you had slow periods, quite frankly, all the time, even with 100% buzz. The food truck has you constantly cooking. Special Orders come in a constant, steady stream between stops, and your Holding Stations always feel like they could be better optimised if you do have a gap between Special Orders. The routes (but not the days for the route) always have the same number of customers across all their days, and they share the number of stops and the distance. If you obsess over replaying the levels like I do, you'll start to remember how things will be spaced out so you can plan better.
The food truck attacks start as minor inconveniences but by mid-to-late game they provide exhilarating challenges. Losing a holding station or two is one thing, losing all the contents of them is another. Not seeing upcoming Holding Station orders isn't the end of the world, not seeing what any of your orders are ensures you have a good grasp of your menu. The endgame attack which removes your upgrades is brutal but incredibly fun.
The addition of the Iron Cook Speedway has cemented CSD3?!'s magnificence by eliminating my only real gripe with the game - the ease of complacency. As is inevitable for most games, one can easily fall back on dominant strategy, in CSD3?!'s case that being focusing on auto-served foods with high point to skill/time ratios (Calzones and Tamales exemplify this, they have no right to be 5-point dishes given how simple they are to execute). By the end of the game with a maxed-out food truck, attacks are a nonissue as you can simply disable them, and save for some scenarios where you can only do menus with no auto-served dishes, or niche challenge levels where you have to use foods you might not have memorised (looking at you King Potatoes), levels begin to bleed together.
The Iron Cook Speedway rectifies this by offering the CSD franchise's truest challenge yet by simply taking away the ability to nullify attacks, and by stacking those attacks on top of each other.
Making foods that are engraved in my memory is not as reliable as it once was because I'm now doing the recipes in addition to things like invisible cook timers AND shorter holding station freshness AND losing some of those holding stations. Where I could once kind of fumble through some recipes I now have to execute them quickly and perfectly. Furthermore, as is already seen in some of the later cities, you are given weirder and more narrow options for constructing your menus which means learning a wider variety of foods and getting into different rhythms.
The Iron Cook Speedway is effectively the Star World of CSD3?!, a place to demonstrate mastery. Chill mode remains an option as ever meaning it should be possible for anyone to get through the final chapter but it will only be the best of the best chefs who get all Gold.
Like Lasagne or Medoviks, at last we see what happens when layers upon layers of intricacies come together to make a perfect whole.
There are so many other little things that have me in love with CSD3. The food (carried over in part from CSD2) looks incredibly appetising yet still stylised. The accessibility options alleviate the concerns I had about the food truck moving causing motion sickness - you can have things be perfectly still. The sounds that accompany food prep are like little rushes of dopamine. While the writing is mostly farcical fiction, I've still learned so much about food I didn't even know existed. Adding on the little modifiers and challenges as well as mixing up the menu options really makes every level feel fresh. It's also possible to mute the police sirens and gunfire, a minor but important option given the zeitgeist of its release in mid-2020.
David Galindo hopefully hasn't peaked with this entry, but if he has it's a magnificent apex.
I was incredibly hyped for Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! prior to release, but was put off by the changes to the formula. Recipes couldn't be carried out rapid-fire if you remembered the keys, you had to press a key to go to the next page of steps. The menus and level select were obtuse to the point where I had to click blindly to navigate. The preset menus of the restaurants were brilliant as scripted level sequences, but made it difficult to justify working in my own restaurant when that contract work felt like the 'real game'. Unlocking new foods felt incredibly slow. Serving more customers faster than ever was problematised by the need to still hit specific keys to start and serve orders, and that speed made slip ups way more common. The continuation of chores didn't mesh with the new rapidity. Customising the restaurant was cool but I was also inundated with cosmetic unlocks I didn't feel like using because, again, I didn't feel compelled to work in my own restaurant. I return to CSD frequently, but CSD2 felt like experiencing Icarus flying too close to the sun.
When I saw Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! was in Early Access I was delighted but hesitant to give it a shot having been disappointed before, but it has surpassed both CSD2 and CSD in terms of quality. The story is not on the same level as the likes of LISA or Disco Elysium, though it is serviceable and interesting (I definitely did some Wiki deepdiving to find out about The Blue War and what happened to Japan). The voice acting is cute and I still love the hums the customers make. I was surprised to find that the soundtrack was composed by the same artist as the previous games since the step up in production and general quality is incredible. CSD and CSD2 had good soundtracks to be sure, but CSD3 has bops that are stuck in my head and occupy my Spotify playlists.
The design of CSD3's gameplay is virtually without flaw, retaining the best aspects of the previous instalments with its own important and unique additions.
Chores are completely gone (unless you count clearing your service stations due to rot or the level ending - gotta hear that satisfying ka-chunk) meaning my cooking rhythm isn't interrupted by mashing the arrow keys while patience rapidly ticks down.
The new Auto Serve key allows the breakneck speed of CSD2 without the heartbreak of accidentally pushing the key for something you just started cooking. You're saved from the potential hearing damage that everything going off at once would cause since it quickly 'scrolls' through the available dishes for an intensely satisfying series of chimes. And it doesn't save you from having to complete a dish, it simply helps push out things that would normally require a simple key press. It's small in theory but it goes a long way towards maintaining the 'flow' of CSD. Making some of the more complicated dishes was hard enough without having to hunt down dishes ready to go.
One still has to navigate through pages of ingredients as in CSD2, but the removal of side dish juggling and addition of Auto Serve makes this is less stressful. You can also change the colors of the page indicators!
Delicious ratings are less of a hassle to collect as they simply replace your Great ratings once you hit a certain combo of perfect dishes - no more worrying about having side dishes prepped in your incredibly important Holding Stations.
Chill mode still makes you feel incredible for doing well and serves as a good set of low-shame training wheels while you learn the game or try out new recipes. For the first few regions of the game I stayed on Chill and didn't feel like I was 'wussing out' of the 'real' experience at all. Not getting Gold Medals (you're locked to Silver if you play on Chill) does mean some levels can't be accessed without playing on Standard at least a bit, but the plethora of levels means you can still progress through the story and the vast majority of the levels. Those tied behind Gold Medals are usually some of the hardest challenges in the game. The 'choose your own difficulty' manner of the CSD series' menu configurations means you could probably replicate similar circumstances on another level if you really wanted - I can't speak for how missing out on this small subset of content in an official capacity might feel for those unable to access it.
Unlike CSD and CSD2, it's not difficult to earn the game's currency, which means it's easy to unlock the foods you want, and it gets easier as you rack up more difficult and expensive foods. Decorations now serve as a sink for any remaining currency, though power players like myself barely have a dent put in our virtual wallets.
It's nice not having foods 'taken away' from you once you reach a certain point like in CSD, your access to food will remain. While each level presents certain menu categories, I assure you you'll be able to make Brownies again, whereas in CSD you will eventually make your last Corn Dog long before the game ends.
Upgrading your truck makes the game more manageable but also allows more difficult situations to be created through additional Holding/Prep Stations. For example, the upgrade which refreshes Holding Station freshness and gives you back some servings for finishing a stop lets you focus more on special orders but also incentivises more 'aggressive' play.
The food truck is absolutely genius when it comes to game pacing. In CSD you had slow periods, quite frankly, all the time, even with 100% buzz. The food truck has you constantly cooking. Special Orders come in a constant, steady stream between stops, and your Holding Stations always feel like they could be better optimised if you do have a gap between Special Orders. The routes (but not the days for the route) always have the same number of customers across all their days, and they share the number of stops and the distance. If you obsess over replaying the levels like I do, you'll start to remember how things will be spaced out so you can plan better.
The food truck attacks start as minor inconveniences but by mid-to-late game they provide exhilarating challenges. Losing a holding station or two is one thing, losing all the contents of them is another. Not seeing upcoming Holding Station orders isn't the end of the world, not seeing what any of your orders are ensures you have a good grasp of your menu. The endgame attack which removes your upgrades is brutal but incredibly fun.
The addition of the Iron Cook Speedway has cemented CSD3?!'s magnificence by eliminating my only real gripe with the game - the ease of complacency. As is inevitable for most games, one can easily fall back on dominant strategy, in CSD3?!'s case that being focusing on auto-served foods with high point to skill/time ratios (Calzones and Tamales exemplify this, they have no right to be 5-point dishes given how simple they are to execute). By the end of the game with a maxed-out food truck, attacks are a nonissue as you can simply disable them, and save for some scenarios where you can only do menus with no auto-served dishes, or niche challenge levels where you have to use foods you might not have memorised (looking at you King Potatoes), levels begin to bleed together.
The Iron Cook Speedway rectifies this by offering the CSD franchise's truest challenge yet by simply taking away the ability to nullify attacks, and by stacking those attacks on top of each other.
Making foods that are engraved in my memory is not as reliable as it once was because I'm now doing the recipes in addition to things like invisible cook timers AND shorter holding station freshness AND losing some of those holding stations. Where I could once kind of fumble through some recipes I now have to execute them quickly and perfectly. Furthermore, as is already seen in some of the later cities, you are given weirder and more narrow options for constructing your menus which means learning a wider variety of foods and getting into different rhythms.
The Iron Cook Speedway is effectively the Star World of CSD3?!, a place to demonstrate mastery. Chill mode remains an option as ever meaning it should be possible for anyone to get through the final chapter but it will only be the best of the best chefs who get all Gold.
Like Lasagne or Medoviks, at last we see what happens when layers upon layers of intricacies come together to make a perfect whole.
There are so many other little things that have me in love with CSD3. The food (carried over in part from CSD2) looks incredibly appetising yet still stylised. The accessibility options alleviate the concerns I had about the food truck moving causing motion sickness - you can have things be perfectly still. The sounds that accompany food prep are like little rushes of dopamine. While the writing is mostly farcical fiction, I've still learned so much about food I didn't even know existed. Adding on the little modifiers and challenges as well as mixing up the menu options really makes every level feel fresh. It's also possible to mute the police sirens and gunfire, a minor but important option given the zeitgeist of its release in mid-2020.
David Galindo hopefully hasn't peaked with this entry, but if he has it's a magnificent apex.
2 Comments
I got this game when the Epic store gave it away for free, but didn't really think much of it beyond that, I thought that it would just be another cooking simulator. But after reading is I will put into my backlog, this sounds so fun, creative and mechanically sound. The food truck attacks are a idea so good I'm mad I haven't seen something similar in another game yet.
Amazing review!
Amazing review!
Detchibe
1 year ago