Overcooked

Overcooked tells a story of love, life, cooking and the end of the world. It seems as though giant vegetables are coming to consume us all and it’s up to the onion king to stop them. He travels back in time to the 1990’s where he will train two trustee chefs in cooking some of the most delicious dishes known to man. This way they can feed the angry giant vegetables and stop the end of the world. I know, it sounds completely mental but it’s kind of refreshing in a way. It’s wacky and completely off the wall that it actually works well as a light heart and enjoy tale. Not to mention the aesthetics are really lovely too. The soundtrack is mellow and sweet along with the clean, colourful and charming visuals.

The core gameplay in Overcooked is to create a variation of dishes and serving them up in a slotted time frame. You’ll create dishes including tomato soup, Fish and chips and burgers by chopping key ingredients, cooking them, putting them together and serving the dish up for points. There’s a great emphasis on timing and cognitive gameplay as you’ll have to place the right ingredients together on demand and as quick as possible.

Dishes such as soups will remain fairly simple to make as they really consist of one key ingredient. Once chopped it goes into the pot for boiling while minding it doesn’t overcook and cause a fire. But other dishes such as burgers require a more complex process, which include multiple ingredients and certain other factors such as frying the meat once it’s chopped. Yet you will be tasked to creating different types of once dish, so a customer might want a burger just plain or with all the works including lettuce and tomato. These little touches do keep the aspect of challenge fresh and players mindful on what to cook, saving them from making the same exact thing over and over. It’s about following the orders and making sure the customers are satisfied.

As a single player experience it’s about maintaining your timing and ensuring your cognitive side of the brain is fully on ball with the orders. As for co-op, it’s about team work and communication as each party will most likely take certain roles, from chopping veg, to cooking the meat and cleaning up the dishes to keep things moving at a steady pace. There are certain dynamic factors which will ensure more pressure is applied such as levels which split up the players, move the ingredients around or pesky critters come along to steal the food. This is a stressful game to say the least yet it can be rather rewarding.

Overcooked is a solid game with interesting mechanics and enjoyable gameplay but the experience suffers in its single player campaign. Overcooked feels a little repetitive as the game follows the same process and objective over and over for each level. You do get some level alterations and a mix up of dishes but the core gameplay remains the same of chopping, cooking and placing the dish together to serve. It’s the same process throughout and by the half way point in the campaign it gets tedious. The more agonising thing with the progression of the campaign is that challenges become either way too easy to far too difficult for a single player. What would have been a great feature is allowing two controllable characters with one controller. This has been done since the Game cube and is entirely possible here.

The multiplayer holds up better for both campaign and competitive modes. It has a great competitive edge and the main campaign itself feels more balanced. With another person or two the game feels more fluent and the interactions and teamwork aspects are much more enjoyable. The only major problem is that there is no online play, which is a huge shame as this game is good with local play but with online this could really shine.

Overcooked is a simple, cute and charming little title which does harbour some interesting gameplay elements but is sadly too thin to last for long play times in the single player campaign. This really is a game to play with other people and it excels more so when playing together or against. But without online play, this little title is held back massively.

+ Cute, colourful visuals
+ Pleasant aesthetics
+ Great competitive gameplay

- Single player is limited and repetitive
- No online play

An Xbox One copy of Overcooked was provided by Team 17 for the purpose of this review