Revisited this mostly as a way to check out how well Xbox's Cloud Gaming service works (the answer? better than you'd expect but I'd imagine the lag would be complete misery in a game that isn't mostly slow paced like this is) but also because sometimes you just gotta replay a childhood classic to remind yourself that this world isn't completely terrible, y'know? Going in I figured I'd put together a garden, maybe run through all the sours and then call it a day, I've put so many hours into this game over the years that not every playthrough needs to go for 100%. What I didn't expect was that this game would hook me in yet again just like it did all those years ago and I'd wind up playing and playing until I couldn't pinata anymore.

Personally I've always considered the Viva Pinata series to be Rare's last hurrah before their quiet and peaceful death (and indeed before their unceremonious revival as an unholy shambling corpse at the hands of Microsoft's necromancers). It kinda feels like a fitting end for the company that was indisputably the king of gaming in the 90s, it's very much ahead of its time like so many Rare classics are, it's among the best-looking of its era and features so much of that classic wry British charm that Rare's always had in spades, while at the same time feeling like a far cry for the company that infamously (and at the time recently) broke off the legendary partnership with Nintendo that made them a household name because they really wanted to chase the M-Rated high Goldeneye gave them. This was also the last game composer Grant Kirkhope worked on for the company that made him famous, and you can tell in some of the music tracks that he too recognizes this as an end of an era.

But really, if this was Rare's informal goodbye to the game industry, then it's a hell of a way to go. Maybe it's nostalgia talking because I played this game so much when I was around 10 that the strategy guide I had literally disintegrated, but I think that Viva Pinata is the single best life simulation game ever made with the exception of Animal Crossing. As with all of Rare's best games, Trouble in Paradise is packed to the gills with stuff to do and things to collect so you never get bored and everytime you feel ready to take a break you're always struck with that feeling of "Welllll...lemme just do this first." All of the many collectible papery critters are delightfully colourful, wonderfully designed and just so damn expressive that you leave the game feeling nothing but love for each and every one of them. They're all just so full of life and personality that you can't help but say "aww" as a wild owl ravages its way through the mouse population you've spent hours building up. You feel genuine excitement every time you trigger something new to appear or visit or best of all decide to stay in your garden, and there's no greater feeling than when you come up with a massive plan involving redesigning your garden to bring in something new and everything goes perfectly.

The one thing I'll knock Trouble in Paradise for is that sometimes it can be a little frustrating. For one, you're kind of at the mercy of what wild pinatas the game spawns outside your garden barriers. You could have everything ready for one specific critter only for it to just not show up for days on end for seemingly no reason, and that gets very annoying, especially if you're waiting on something specific to show up before you can move on to the next thing you have planned. Usually my playthroughs of this game end when I just don't feel like waiting around for stuff to show up anymore, and that's more or less what happened this time as well. I also think that the antagonists who want nothing more than to ruin your day are way too OP here, particularly main baddie Professor Pester. This red-faced jackass comes into your garden on a daily basis with the goal of smashing your most valuable critter, and dealing with him is a colossal headache. There are ways to manage his visits but they range from expensive to unreliable, so in the end the only real way to stop him is by exploiting a fence glitch that leaves him completely befuddled for a few minutes outside your barriers before heading home. In all my years of playing of this game I've yet to meet another fan that doesn't utilize this glitch in every playthrough, and that's because completely removing the Professor from the equation does nothing but improve Trouble in Paradise. There are also a few requirements that border on complete insanity, like the five elephants needed to free the eagle. I read a comment once that said something along the lines of "90% of this game is super fun and relaxing, but man, that extra 10% is a pain" and I couldn't agree more.

Yes, Trouble in Paradise is far from perfect, and yes, a lot of my love for the game comes from nostalgia, but I still think that this is one of the most underrated games to ever exist. The only thing it really did wrong was release on a console that mostly pandered to the FPS crowd in an era when that genre was the only thing people bought an Xbox for, because I've always thought it deserves more love. The best compliment I have for it was that even with the lag of Cloud Gaming I still had an amazing time revisiting Pinata Island.

This dopey trout has three pairs of underwear and five hundred journals. What are you writing about? Swamp ass?

What's fairly interesting to me about this game is the ambient storytelling explored as you progress through the acts. What the faceless and wordless protagonist chooses to bring with her and return to as she travels through time, and the wear & tear they each experience as they cling to their passions through young adulthood. A fresh new undecorated house offering you free reign to personalise as if you've just bought a new Habbo Hotel apartment would often be preceded by a move with roommates, where the living space is shared and belongings need to be negotiated and respected. Unpacking really can be surprisingly stressful for a game that purports itself to be a zen little experience.

What ultimately holds the game back for me is the bizarre rules you're made to follow before a level counts as clear. As the last box is unfurled, red highlights activate throughout the house and they rarely ever seem to be for good reason - you can't even leave mugs on coasters.

Hatred stems from disagreement. And disagreement, in turn, most often seems to stem from misunderstanding. Its the absolute rawest form of negativity, meant to communicate said disagreement as loud and clear as possible.

You cannot hold proper discussion on this game without first acknowledging just how deep in its predecessors shadow it lies. Pokèmon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time&Darkness – and later Sky – was such a perfect followup and incredible game in general, both refining everything Rescue Team had established whilst also holding heaps of content to dig into that gave the game its own identity. Aside from a wonderful, charming story of growth and self-confidence, it features an absolutely massive world that's just begging to be explored, with difficult optional missions galore and oh so many Pokèmon to find. It was a brilliantly rewarding gameplay loop paired with a well-paced, meaningful story, that resulted in a damn near perfect game, beloved by 2000s kids the world over.

So when the expectations thus became higher than ever for the series, not just to keep raising the bar of quality but also to debut the series into a new era entirely on the 3DS, it seems obvious in hindsight that the results would never live up to those high standards set. Yet it was worse than that - as the game released, with every review that came out that I read as a teen, it seemed more and more like the game had fumbled the ball entirely, missing every crucial point that had made Explorers so perfect. "Only 140 Pokèmon?!" "No hunger bar?" "Next to no postgame?" “No personality test?” The issues just seemed like they mounted on and on, for a series I had come to believe was infallible. Sure enough, Pokèmon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity had been released – and I Hated it.

But looking back, there’s a lot there that doesn’t really seem to add up. I and many people my age loved Explorers, sure, but…critics never really did, with most official reviews of the time giving the game middling scores. So back then the critics were wrong, but…now they were right? Or were the critics always right, was Explorers always a mediocre game? The answer is less black and white than it would first seem.

When I described Explorers earlier, I noted that it didn’t just have a good story, but a meaningful story. My word choice was deliberate: my reading of Explorers is that it’s very specifically a story about individual’s self-worth and their quests for validation. Your partner is weak and cowardly, and wants to prove themselves to the world by being a successful explorer, achieve their dream through essentially climbing a corporate ladder. Together you end up working at the Wigglytuff’s Guild, and whilst you do end up on speaking terms with all of your colleagues, they’re still just that, colleagues. Doing missions day by day, challenging yourself to take on harder ones in dungeons you’ve already been to, really does convey a sense that you’re getting better at this job: The reason stacking missions together to fell them all in one swoop feels so good is the same reason it feels good to turn in multiple assignments in a single day, or why it can feel so good to get paid extra for your labor at a 9-to-5 job – What I’m getting at is that Explorers is a game very much about finding self-worth in a capitalist system. It’s not a scathing critique of the system, but it nonetheless shows the flaws within it: Your life becomes that of routine under your bosses, you’re forced to put up with obviously manipulative and toxic co-workers, and even with your nice co-workers your relationship with them never goes beyond solidarity for doing a good job. Most of the game’s pathos and many of its mechanics feed into this theme, in a way that makes the entire game come together extremely well. Even as the story turns to an adventure to save the world, the focus remains strictly on half a dozen key characters and their trials within that conflict.

But did you notice what I did in that paragraph? With the game’s theme established, I was able to turn what would otherwise be interpreted as issues in the game, into things heightening its thematic throughline. You need to revisit Dungeons a lot, many prominent characters are shallow and one-note, a lot of the game is spent doing the same things over and over, and crucially: The easy dungeon-crawling gameplay honestly isn’t all that fun. What critics may have found fault in, fans clicked with. It's akin to how those who grew up with the survival horror games of the 90s understand the value tank controls added to those games, whereas new players often feel more like they're an issue to work around. When a game's goals are understood, its issues can turn to strengths, and disagreement slowly dissipates.

I don’t want to frame this review as if everyone who’s critical of Gates to Infinity are just plebians who don’t understand it. Hell, there’s a lot about the game that makes me enjoy it less than Explorers at the end of the day. My point with all of this is that it’s been a very important playthrough for me specifically in terms of reflecting on how I evaluate media. Because now that we’ve established how perceived faults can work to strengthen a game’s thematic core and overall narrative, I’m going to put the cards on the table and make my case.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity is a game made in direct response to its predecessor, that turns all of that game’s ideas inside-out and shows the benefits of veering in a completely opposite direction. That’s right - since Explorers was a game about capitalism, Gates to Infinity is thus a game about communism. Buckle up.

We’ll start the same place we did with Explorers: Your partner. Though its easy to perceive the Partners in the Mystery Dungeon games to all be copy-pasted stand-ins, its immediately noticeable in comparison to Explorers just how much more lively and energetic Gates to Infinity’s partner is. They have a genuine dream not of self-success or becoming stronger, but to bring other people together, for the sole purpose of helping each other live happier. In Explorers, “enemy Pokémon” were framed as a necessary obstacle to work around to succeed in missions, an unfortunate side effect of the world’s collapse but one the Guild would only help solve by punishing those branded as outlaws. Gates to Infinity’s focus on community meanwhile reframes them as being angry, lost souls, that you help give a new home in your Pokémon paradise. The main plot at the start of the game even centers on you and your partner helping hurt people like Gurdurr and Scraggy overcome their faults, whilst also befriending those willing to help build this community like Emolga and Dunsparce. Suddenly these people around you aren’t tools or passerbys, but genuine friends, characters with arcs and dynamics and reactions to the world. You don’t have a job demanding you do as many missions as possible, so the requests you do one-by-one in this game are framed as your team having a genuine desire to help others, with the thanks gained mainly being materials that feed into town building. By just changing the reward so subtly from money to materials, the loop of doing missions has gone from being self-fulfilling to being toward the betterment of a community, a group of people all helping each other to form a better world. It's not a game about exploring new frontiers so much as it's a game about bettering the home you've built.

Do you see what I mean? Once it clicks that Gates is deliberately trying to show the other side of the coin that Explorers gave us, it lets you appreciate most every decision made in Gates to some extent. View cynically, the townbuilding gameplay is just a gimmicky distraction from the core gameplay loop - but viewed within what the game is trying to do, the townbuilding flat out becomes part of that loop, as you’re now doing missions to help build it rather than to better yourself. Dungeons aren’t so massive in size in this game just for padding, but because you’re gonna need every scrap of money you can find from them to buy what material resources cannot. You’re unemployed, after all! And since they want you to cover so much ground in dungeons, hunger would become a hugely annoying issue. Arguably, its existence before was mainly just to encourage you to keep moving through dungeons to get work done, which would again clash with the game’s direction. Take any controversial change made from Explorers to Gates to Infinity, and I would gladly argue there’s a thematic reason there that helps the story and overall gameplay experience click together better.

But I’ll drop the deep-goggles for a bit and just say, simply: Playing the game is still pretty fun. It starts out a bit slow, but overtime you get to appreciate a lot of the quality of life done to evolve the gameplay of the series forward. Moves can level up, meaning if you have a niche-use move with low damage or accuracy, you can keep using it and eventually be rewarded for your efforts. While there’s less Pokémon to choose from, in return all the Pokémon you do encounter are allowed to evolve whenever rather than having to wait for the postgame, and that leads to you forming a greater connection to them. Explorers made the teammates a bit disposable given that they would inevitably lag behind, but in Gates they’re both allowed to evolve and gain EXP even without participating in battles, which is both a great boon for building your own teams and also feeds into the game’s themes of community - Okay, I’ll stop! You can now access any of your four moves without opening a menu, which is the kind of streamlining this menu-reliant series absolutely needed. You absolutely CAN still deep dive into menus and item descriptions if you so choose, but it’s a lot more avoidable now compared to in the prior two games and the menus themselves have a much more beginner-friendly UI. Combine that with the aforementioned shared EXP with all your recruited members and lack of hunger, and I felt a stronger drive to be experimental in this game compared to Explorers, where I’d usually rely on one Set move and a bunch of Max Elixirs to make battles go by as menu-less as possible. Going further with this I think some of the controversial changes discussed prior actually do have benefits for the gameplay, with the limited Starter selection sticking out to me as the most interesting one. There’s now less choice, and the lack of a personality test makes the story’s shift from focusing on individuality clearer than it’s ever been, but in return the five available Starters feel like they’ve had the game balanced specifically around them. For instance, in the dungeon Forest of Shadows, taking place at a point where the player and partner go off solo on a dangerous mission that’s about to make things turn for the far worse in the story, every single Pokémon there exists to “counter” one of the available starters, making it a difficult Dungeon to traverse no matter who you play as. Plus, each of the starters are now a lot more distinct from one another to play as: Oshawott gets moves like Encore and Fury Cutter for a slow-burn massacre, which gives it a wholly unique playstyle from Tepig, who relies on Flame Charge and Rollout to quickly overwhelm.

To keep things spoiler-free, I’ll just say that the story does evolve in a very interesting and enjoyable way. The evil presented in Explorers stemmed from two people’s individual feelings of insecurity and self-doubt spiraled into chaos, whereas in this game we’re shown the results of what a poor, unhealthy community can result in. People who stick together because they feel rejected from the rest of the world, and using that negativity to push hatred toward others…it’s a bit corny, maybe, but I really do think it works, and it was an easy way to make the villains sympathetic despite their actions. Though the story works well, I can’t act as if it’s all perfectly executed: its pacing really is the main thing holding the game back for me. The start of the game is a lovely slow-trickle where the plot and the townbuilding feel like they're of equal importance, yet by the second half the story starts taking so much prominence that it becomes overwhelming. When you're taken away from Paradise for about eight dungeons in a row, sure you could argue that the game is intentionally trying to make you miss home and long to return to your community, but…it kinda takes that a bit too far. I love all the characters you meet though, Munna, Hydreigon, Virizion, they’ve earned their places in my heart right alongside Grovyle, Dusknoir and Wigglytuff from Explorers. I also love how every Mystery Dungeon game makes the origins of your human-turned-Pokémon player-insert character a key point of intrigue and that they tie it into the overall theming of the story. You’d think there would only be so many ways to tell the story of a human being sucked into the Pokémon world, yet the small variations in how its executed really do go a long way and made this game’s ending hit all the harder.

Small variations in how a similar idea is executed…it’s wild that for a series so often derided in its main series for being stagnant, that this one spinoff spawned so much discourse for the complete opposite reason. But I can’t really defend it all the way through: As a sequel to Explorers, it really is woefully lacking in content. While the lack of connection you hold to the outside world works wonders for the tight-knit homey feel of the story, it leads to you not really caring about exploring the rest of the game once that story is beat: There’s no real drive to become better, and without an evolving narrative townbuilding becomes more of a chore. Even for how much I’m willing to forgive Gates to Infinity, it was just never going to be able to live up to Explorers’ high bar. But I’m happy that the developers seemingly knew that going into development, and chose to make an excellent opposite-approach rather than try to one-up themselves. Even then, they really did succeed greatly in some areas - I think the jump to 3D is absolutely breathtaking for instance, adapting the environmental design of the old games’ pixelart to 3D ludicrously well and the soundtrack is enchantingly good. With the unbelievable workload already placed upon them to basically recreate the series’ fundamentals onto a 3D framework, I’m amazed they still decided to make such a boldly unique-feeling entry in the series.

Though my few issues remain, the disagreement between me and ChunSoft has dissipated, and my understanding of the game has improved. And I’ve never been happier to have been proven wrong.

[Playtime: 51 Hours]
[Key word: Misjudged]

Na erg genoten te hebben van de eerste Marvel's Spider-Man, had ik veel zin in een vervolg. Mede door deze reden heb ik Marvel's Spider-Man 2 dan ook direct op release opgepikt en ook deze game was weer genieten. De gameplay, de story en alle andere elementen van de game zijn net zo goed, zo niet beter dan de eerste game. Sowieso een aanrader als je de eerste game leuk vond.

Categorieën:
{⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐}

Verhaal ⭐⭐⭐⭐:
Net als in de eerste game was dit spel weer een feest van herkenning voor Marvel en Spider-Man fans. Geen enkel element van het verhaal is er langer dan nodig en vooral de laatste paar uur van het spel bestaan uit setpiece na setpiece.
Hiernaast worden er ook een paar balletjes opgeworpen voor een mogelijk vervolg, dus dat is zeker iets om naar uit te kijken.

Gameplay ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐:
De eerste game stond bekend om de uitspraak "it makes you feel like spider-man" en ondanks de humor die nu verbonden is aan deze uitspraak is het wederom wel het geval. Het slingeren door de straten van New York en het vechten met de verschillende vijanden voelt allemaal nog beter en samen met de nieuwe toevoegingen zoals de web wings en de nieuwe gadgets is dit, naar mijn mening, de beste uitvoering van dit systeem tot nu toe.

Visuals/Stijl ⭐⭐⭐⭐:
Qua visuals is er niet veel veranderd ten opzichte van de vorige twee games. Het ziet er nog steeds prachtig uit. Een klein bijzonder puntje is dat de verschillende suits die gebaseerd zijn op de spiderverse films ook daadwerkelijk op een lagere framerate bewegen dan de rest van het spel (was ook wel in de vorige games volgens mij?). Desalniettemin een leuk detail.

Muziek/Geluidseffecten ⭐⭐⭐⭐:
De muziek in deze game is weer genieten, tijdens de bossfights klinkt een dramatische soundtrack die doet denken aan de verschillende Dark Souls games en tijdens de cutscenes zijn tracks te horen die elk scenario goed ondersteunen. De geluidseffecten heb ik eigenlijk niks op aan te merken, de webs klinken weer lekker sappig en elke stoot klinkt alsof hij daadwerkelijk een gezicht breekt. De ringtone van spider-man is wel irritant, vooral door de hoge hoeveelheid van telefoontjes die je binnenkrijgt.

(Zij) activiteiten ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐:
De zij activiteiten zijn een fijne afleiding van het hoofdverhaal en het mooie is dat elke zij activiteit iets toevoegt aan het algehele verhaal. De activiteiten beschikken allemaal over een structuur die veel voldoening geeft bij het afronden en ik zou iedereen zeker aanraden om zo veel mogelijk zij activiteiten te doen.

100%? ✅
Ik heb de game 100% uitgespeeld en ik zou iedereen zeker aanraden om dit ook te doen. De meeste zij activiteiten zijn door het hoofdverhaal heen uit te voeren en ze geven ook voldoende aanmoediging in de vorm van een pakkende verhaallijn en leuke upgrades die je kunnen helpen in de rest van het verhaal.
Er zijn geen trofeeën die gemist kunnen worden en naast de spider-bots moeten alle trofeeën ook relatief snel opgepakt kunnen worden.
Een minpunt is wel dat ik na het uitspelen van het spel tegen een bug aanliep waarbij verschillende random crimes verdwenen als ik erbij in de buurt kwam. Aangezien deze crimes je belonen met tech parts die je nodig hebt om je gadgets en je pak te verbeteren duurde het helaas langer dan gewild om deze trofee te verkrijgen. Al met al sowieso een aanrader om de platinum (ik speel op playstation) te halen voor deze game, maar haal alle pak en gadget upgrades wel voordat je de laatste missie start!

Slotwoord
Ja wat kan ik hier nog zeggen wat ik niet in de rest van de review gezegd heb, deze game is op bijna alle punten een verbetering ten opzichte van de eerste Spider-Man game en ik zou iedereen die daarvan genoten heeft het zeker aanraden om deze op te pikken.

Octopath Traveler was a game that took me by surprise with how much I enjoyed it. Initially, I wasn't interested in the game due to it resembling Bravely Default and because I got filtered by both Bravely Default & Octopath Traveler's demos when those were released. In retrospect, I went into them hoping for and expecting them to be games that I could play and keep my brain turned off. Before & during my playthrough of the first Octopath Traveler I realized I was a total idiot. When I finally gave the game a proper chance, I found the strategy required in taking down bosses and enemies to be one of the best parts of the game. Octopath Traveler II keeps everything good about the first game and improves upon its shortcomings to deliver a fantastic RPG that is sure to become a classic in due time.

The gameplay is mostly the same with all of the primary jobs from the first game coming back. Even the new secondary jobs share some similarities to the ones in the previous game. However, they added one new mechanic and it is one that can become a game-changer in tough situations, Latent Powers. Each traveler has a unique one with different benefits. A few examples would be, Partitio's latent power that allows him to have max BP, Agnea's which allows her single attack moves to attack all enemies, or Hikari's & Ochette's which give them access to special attacks. I can't count the number of times this mechanic saved me from what would otherwise have been a game over had it not been added. There are also EX skills that grant you access to more powerful abilities but I didn't use them as much as I probably could have. They may not have been vital additions to the game, but they are welcome ones that make the game a little bit easier and each character more unique.

The biggest issues with the first game were the story and the 8 travelers you play as barely interact with each other. While there were a couple of travelers from the first game whose stories I ended up enjoying more, in most cases the stories were more interesting and an improvement over the first one. The pacing for each story was better too. Some chapters are split into two parts that give the game a little more breathing room to flesh out the story a little more compared to everyone in the first game where they only had 4 chapters. They fixed my biggest gripe with the first game's story and that was the lack of connection between each traveler's quest. The final chapter unites all of the characters together in order to save the world and also adds some lore that pieces some events in their respective stories together.

The travelers interact with each other a lot more and in a handful of others ways than they did in the first game. There is the banter dialogue which is a lot easier to find than it was in the first game (I didn't even know it existed in Octopath 1 till the end of the game), the crossed paths chapters that involve two of the travelers going on an adventure together, and the final chapter that unites them all. Seeing all your party members interact with each other might seem like a small, unimportant oversight, but it comes a long way in enhancing the experience.

While the first Octopath Traveler may have a special place in my heart, Octopath Traveler II is a game that surpasses it in pretty much every way. If this game is an indication of what is in store for the future of the Octopath Traveler franchise, then its a series that has a bright future ahead of it.

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.