Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!

Review

Despite the U.S.A. being a war-torn country, the food industry is still experiencing growth in 2041. Some of the most famous restaurant chains have managed to open several venues in these challenging times. But let’s face it, if you are a top chef, at the top of your game, the pinnacle of your culinary career would be to work as the head chef at the most prestigious restaurants of all! That’s right, it would be at the one and only Cook, Serve, Delicious Restaurant. What a place to work! Friendly staff, beautiful food and the panoramic view is to die for! Here you are on your first shift, working your bum off over the stoves when suddenly . . . the restaurant explodes! Everyone perishes except you, and you now lie unconscious under a pile of rumble! Thankfully, you are found by the first emergency robot crew, Cleaver and Whisk.   Even better, they transform their vehicle into a cooking truck so you can travel all around America and cook, serving delicious meals everywhere you stop!

Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! Is a fast-paced typing/management cooking game developed and self-published by Vertigo Gaming Inc on the 14^th of October 2020 on the Steam platform. The game is also available on PS4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One.

The first important step in this game is to familiarise yourself with your new kitchen. It might be a shock to the system, but cooking in a truck is quite challenging, to say the least. Don’t worry, thought, your first run will be a short and well-explained tutorial.

From then on it will be totally up to you to choose the menu you are going to cook and serve in each of your runs. Each day is slightly different to the next. First, you’ll need to know how many stops you’ll be making. Secondly, you’ll have to choose your menu, which consists of foods that you have to prepare in your holding stations (HS) and special orders (SP), and as far as I can see, it’s usually 50-50.  On some days, you’ll have to make menus that have a specific point difficulty. To give you and example, you might have to include eight recipes in your menu with five difficulty points. Some recipes have zero points, which means that they are very straight forward, but others have up to five difficulty points each and are challenging to execute. If you are like me with average typing skill, you might be more inclined to choose a menu with recipes from one to two difficulty points; sometimes you’ll have to pick beyond your limit anyway! Fortunately, you can practise each recipe before selecting it. When you’re all set, the run will start!

On the top left of your screen, you’ll have the holding stations (your start with four), and the prep stations (you’ll start with seven) will be on the left side of your screen.  On the top right, you’ll see how many stops you’ll have to make during the day and how far, in terms of kilometres, the stops are from each other. This also varies each day. What you have to do is to make sure you have enough food in your holding stations to fulfil the orders at your next stop, and also manage to cook the special orders which will be held in the prep stations. F1, F2, F3 etc. keys will activate the holding stations while the numerical keys (0-9) will be for the special orders, and let me tell you, it will be a frantic typing feast from the first day!  Your goal is to make sure that 100% of your customers are happy in order to score a gold medal each day!  Just one unhappy customer because you haven’t managed to serve him/her on time or you’ve put the wrong ingredient in their food, and bye-bye gold medal! Still, you might snitch a silver or bronze medal, but if you stuff everything up, you’ll only receive breadcrumbs for your efforts. To make it even harder, you might be subjected to a truck attack any day and lose a station or two. Fun… Fun… Fun!

After each run, you’ll receive experience points and money according to your menu difficulty and the number of happy customers you serve.  If you have great success, you’ll receive a medal in addition to extra experience points and extra money.

Every time you level up, you’ll receive some electronic gear which you can use to upgrade your trunk or purchase certain decorations. With the money, you can purchase new recipes and decorations as well.

I really like this game, without having played the previous two games. I like the fact that there is a bit of strategy in the game around building your menu so that you can execute it. Make sure you have the proper meal ready to go in the holding stations, and you’ll also have to memorise which letter corresponds to each ingredient. And guess what? Chicken is the bloody letter ‘K’ because C,H,I are for other ingredients. . .  You will experience brain and finger cramps!

There is plenty of content in this game, with stacks of recipes, interesting descriptions and over 380 levels to complete.  And to top it all off, the game is extremely addictive (but also frustrating).

The graphics are sharp and colourful, and the soundtrack is pretty good. You can play this game with a gamepad if you wish, but don’t be surprised if you suddenly become bald next time you look in the mirror. . . I find it too hard, so the keyboard is the way to go, in my opinion.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com