SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Overcooked offers lots of co-op fun but is undercut by imprecise controls and an underwhelming single-player experience.
Chaos. That’s the only way to describe Overcooked’s hectic kitchens. It mixes nostalgia for old-school co-op with a kitchen experience that wouldn’t be out of place on Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. Its greatest success is transforming the seemingly simple task of having four people collaborate for a few minutes on the same task into a mad rush for points, where the smallest mistakes snowball until your partners have fallen off trucks and your shared kitchen is ablaze. Whatever plans you might concoct with your team, Overcooked eventually makes you toss them out the nearest garbage disposal and guaranteeing some truly hilarious moments. Unfortunately, however, thanks to a few glaring flaws, its true promise of a party game to rival Smash Bros and Mario Kart goes unfulfilled. Something about it feels underdone.
In a team, your task is to prepare food using the most fundamental concepts of cooking: chopping vegetables, frying meat and washing plates, following simple recipes to assemble dishes such as burgers and soups to order. Each correct order fulfilled nets you points, with bonus points awarded for speed. Incorrect orders give you nothing, and represent valuable time wasted. A timer ticks away the seconds as you struggle to coordinate your actions to get that coveted three-star rating on each stage. All of this sounds perfectly manageable on paper. In practice, it is anything but.
The magic of Overcooked is the way it messes with your heads, and transforms running a kitchen efficiently into a near-impossible task. The ticking clock builds pressure even if you’re not looking at it to check how much time you have left. Each stage has been cleverly designed to disrupt whatever strategy your team has come up with. When you first start out, the temptation is to give everyone on your team a role: one person chops the vegetables while another washes the plates so on and so forth. Then you’re set down on the deck of a pirate ship rocking with the swell of the sea. The middle wall of the kitchen shifts with it, and suddenly someone is cut off from the pot of soup on the stove that’s just about to boil over. A mad rush isn’t quick enough. The stove catches fire. Cue yet another mad rush for the extinguisher. Now half the kitchen is ablaze. It’s incredibly hectic, and at any moment quite a few things are just primed to go wrong. When they do, everything goes haywire and even the most carefully laid plans can’t save you.
The level and character design is wonderfully wacky. If you want to play as a raccoon in a wheelchair, then you’re in luck. The cutesy art style with all its bright colours pops off the screen. Playing in a group, we’d pause right at the start of each level to study the layout of our new kitchen and strategise before diving in. Inevitably, something unexpected would throw our plans into disarray: a freak earthquake might divide our kitchen in half, or we’d be forced to navigate our way across two moving trucks. The wide variety of environments, whether it’s the deck of a pirate ship or a space station where your galley shifts between airlocks, keeps Overcooked feeling fresh and fun throughout. That is, if you can bring yourself to play. It’s an intense experience that recalls the old brain training games on Nintendo DS. It’s inevitable that you’ll be forced to improvise and at that point, keeping everything in order is immensely difficult. In fact, it’s physically draining and playing took a lot more out of us than we initially expected. Sometimes damage control is beyond you because playing several stages has already fried your brain. A mistake will grow out of control and you’ll sit there idly as your kitchen goes up in flames. That isn’t fun.
It's not without problems. I’d occasionally find my character picking up the wrong ingredient whenever ingredients were placed close together on a countertop. Some of that is undoubtedly down to the heat of the moment, but other times, the controls are at fault. Overcooked played solo also isn’t worth the price of admission (yes, I’m fully aware it’s free for PlayStation Plus owners). Playing with three or four is ideal. Playing two-player turns the game into a slightly more focused and strategic experience, which is still far superior to solo play.
Still, it’s nice to see nostalgia for couch co-op produce games like Overcooked. You’ll be bellowing instructions to your teammates, trying to make sure that burger patty doesn’t burn, or those rats don’t make off with your carefully chopped lettuce. That experience is a welcome reminder that games don’t have to be sophisticated or nuanced. They can just be plain fun and Overcooked is definitely that, even if it’s still a little raw for our tastes.
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