I’m sure people who know me have been pestered by my enthusiasm and excitement for hardcore typing games such as The Typing of The Dead: Overkill and, especially, Cook, Serve, Delicious!, one of my favourite games of all times.
If I recall correctly, I obtained a Steam key of Cook, Serve, Delicious! directly from its developer, David Galindo, during a giveaway on NeoGAF, and it was an astounding surprise.
That game wasn’t really something you’d buy just by stumbling upon it on Steam. Neither the title, nor the visuals, nor even the premise, were really that enticing. But just play it for five minutes and you’re hooked forever.
For those who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, Cook, Serve, Delicious! is an arcade/hardcore restaurant simulator. Customers come in and order something, and you prepare it by hitting keys on the keyboard (each key is an ingredient, e.g. T is tomato, C is cheese).
At first is kinda relaxed. You don’t get many customers, and you can afford mistyping some ingredients, or missing some orders.
But as the difficulty level increases, you get more and more customers simultaneously, and with much less patience waiting for you to prepare their food.
Eventually, the game is so fast that you can’t really think of what you’re doing anymore. You enter in a zen state, and start hitting keys by muscular memory and reflexes only. And it feels amazing.
Setting up the menu with your favourite foods and trying to climb the Highest Extreme Difficulty Perfect Combos leaderboard is so fun, and so legitimately hard!
I think the last time I’ve ever played Cook, Serve, Delicious! is when I hit the 323 combo. I was completely spent after 10 minutes of adrenaline rush. I uninstalled the game at ~40 hours of played time.
3 years later, finally Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is released and I’ve bought it right away, without even waiting for a sale (probably the first time ever I’ve done such thing!).
After 10 hours, I can say that the game achieves the amazing feat of remaining faithful to the previous title, while also improving pretty much everything and adding new mechanics that change the pace of the game and require whole new approaches.
The biggest one is the introduction of the Holding Stations.
We can now prepare some food in advance and serve it right away instead of cooking at customer request only.
This is a massive change: Holding Stations are useful to easily increase the combo count, but are also a big pain during rush hours. Serving too many customers too quickly during rush hours means that we’ll have to serve even more customers.
And if we don’t need to prepare anything but we can just instantly serve, we’ll miss those rare moments when we can take a breather while waiting for the food to cook.
Of course Holding Stations are just part of the whole thing, and we still have standard Prep Stations (even more than before, with a new limit of 14 stations!) and the usual chores to keep things as hectic as possible.
Another big change is that now most dishes require a certain order of preparation.
In the first game, we had something like the lasagna, which required strictly ordered sequences of PSCR (pasta, sauce, cheese, parmesan).
Now almost every preparation is nested in multiple pages, each resembling a separate step of the preparation.
For example, to prepare a pizza we could need:
- [Page 1]: Dough, Sauce
- [Page 2]: Mozzarella
- [Page 3]: Ham, Pineapple
Even if we already knew the keys for all the ingredients, we are still forced to change page, sort of to simulate a sequence in the preparations.
This slows down the pace of the game a bit, but it works surprisingly well all the same.
At the same time, some of the more annoying dishes (damn kebab skewers) and tasks of the first game have been streamlined, and they are now both funnier and more realistic.
On top of all this, there are a ton of different dishes to prepare, including a lot of sides which grant tips and increase the customers patience, and a sort of “story” mode (for lack of a better term).
The player’s restaurant of the first game is now the arcade/hardcore mode, and most of the day-to-day game is spent working in pre-built restaurants with fixed menus.
Completing them unlocks new restaurants to work in, and an astounding amount of furniture to decorate our own restaurant.
I’ve been really impressed with how David Galindo managed to pull all of this off.
As it was the case with the first game, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! too is an amazing mix of casual and hardcore that should appeal to anybody with hands and a keyboard (it can be played with a mouse or a gamepad, but with a keyboard is just so much funnier).
Just go and buy it right now!
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