Cook, Serve, Delicious! is all about managing your own restaurant. SherriSoda Tower was once the center of a thriving economy, and though the city had its recent struggles, the economy seems to be coming back. Players will take control of a new restaurant located in SherriSoda tower to attempt to make the business one of the best in the nearby city. It's important to realize the location of the restaurant inside a large building where a high quality eatery can thrive and eventually work its way up to a five star restaurant as an ultimate goal. Story is mostly an afterthought in Cook, Serve, Delicious!, but there are plenty of interesting characters in the game that manage to offer different challenges for the player throughout the single player experience.
Additional menu items can be unlocked through playing the game, and menu items can be upgraded to help prevent some of the problems associated with menu rot of certain foods. Attaining the best foods for your restaurant can be a test in patience while grinding out the necessary money needed to get these new items. The grind further extends how long players will spend with Cook, Serve, Delicious!, but it also exposes players to the few surprises the game has to offer quickly before the game has shown its hand and becomes a tedious practice in repetition rather than an entertaining experience.
To help ease some of the growing pains with the game, Cook, Serve, Delicious! also allows players to purchase additional items for their restaurant such as dishwashers and better cooking utensils that can help make chores and cooking a bit easier, but of course this also takes away precious cash that could be spent elsewhere. This adds a strategic element to the game, as players must choose which new items and upgrades to purchase and which to put off until later. Choosing the right combination of items can be the difference between running a successful restaurant.
There are some neat ideas included in the game that help keep the action fresh. While preparing dishes typically forces players to mash the corresponding letter on a keyboard that matches the first letter in a dish's ingredient, other mini-games will pop up that offer much different challenges such as cleaning a bathroom or taking out the garbage. Each day plays out a little bit different from another, but there is always a brief period during the middle of the shift where players must deal with rush hour and many customers entering and ordering all at once. The game also throws some curveballs with different people entering the building including health inspectors and robbers that will later require the player to give a quick description of the suspect to reduce the monetary loss. While all of these special events are interesting, there are only so many in the game, and most have been seen long before a five star restaurant has been achieved, leaving few surprises for the late game experience.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! was built to be a mobile title, and it shows with how the game controls with a keyboard on computers. Control problems make it difficult to remember which buttons will place certain ingredients in the dish to cause this version of the game far more difficult than using touch screen controls to create food and perform other mini-games. Doubling the problem with the game's difficulty is the $9.99 pricetag on Steam and computer download that is more than twice the price the game costs on the mobile version. The new version is definitely not the definitive version, but the release can come with Steam Trading Cards and a few other features that may make it worth a purchase for some gamers on this platform.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! isn't a complete disaster on Steam, but unless you're picking up the release in a bundle or during a sale, you'll find it difficult to get enough enjoyment out of the title to make it worth a purchase. The game focuses on players quickly learning specific button combinations to serve food and keep customers happy, but a difficult to master control scheme and the need to constantly change out foods to earn the most money make the release a more less than casual experience for gamers just looking to have some fun in the kitchen. Cook, Serve, Delicious! isn't unplayable, and there are hours of gameplay included in the title while incorporating few other good ideas to give players some fun times for their purchase. Cook, Serve, Delicious! could easily be called Cook, Serve, Repeat instead as the hours drag along and players realize they could've have better spent their money elsewhere.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! is now available for PC, Mac and Linux on Steam and Desura, iOS and Android. Cook, Serve, Delicious! has been rated appropriate for ages 12+ for Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco or Drug Use or References. For more information on the game, check out the official Cook, Serve, Delicious! website.
Game Features:
Game Information:
Developer: Vertigo Gaming
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Mac, Linux, iOS & Android
Release Date: October 8, 2013
