Stress aside, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is incredibly addictive when you do get everything right, and the “delicious” bonuses start to stack up. It also highlights how Jonathan Geer’s score drives the sense of urgency when his ear worm of a theme song isn’t burrowing into your brain. This trailer (which features a bunny chow cameo) provides a very good indication of the game’s tempo. Anxiety sufferers should probably avoid it. The latest Cook, Serve, Delicious! is frantic and stressful by default. The goal is perfection under pressure, and, as in reality, if you botch an order, there’s no backspace or reload just an angry customer. Mix things up, though, and you’ll likely find yourself slipping into a “one more route” mentality, and spend your nights plagued by fever dreams of serving each chimichanga with the correct individual choice of sour cream, gauc and other toppings.Įven in Chill mode, though, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is never relaxing. It takes around four hours of play just to reach the second territory of this cross-country cooking adventure. Stick to the same recipes and never venture outside your comfort zone, and the game can easily become tedious.
It’s pretty much up to the player how compelling their Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! experience will be. The trade-off being that you can never achieve more than Silver medal for your efforts – although this doesn’t seem crippling in terms of game advancement. Alternatively, you can play the entire game in Chill mode, without time limits and attacks. Your food truck is also prone to destructive Mad Max-esque attacks by other roving restauranteurs, which can put you on the back foot for the rest of the day.
Standard mode is similar to previous, notoriously challenging CSD games, where customers’ patience dwindles if you’re too slow with orders. There’s one other key setting for players to toggle in Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!: Play mode. The faster and more accurately you deliver orders, the more currency you receive, the faster you level up, and the higher your medal rating for that stage – helping to unlock other gated routes. A menu board helps you prepare the right number of ready-to serve orders for the next destination, while individual special orders flood in to be fulfilled. You then travel a stretch of road with several stops. However, the primary game mechanic is simple enough.Įvery day you decide on a menu that meets certain requirements, such as the number of items, or points (every meal has a point allocation that reflects its complexity). Also optional, but highly recommended as the game’s difficulty ramps up, are turn-on-and-off truck upgrades to improve your service performance and protect your vehicle.Īt this point, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! probably sounds overwhelmingly fiddly and complicated. This customisation is purely cosmetic and optional. Outside of the campaign, you’re encouraged to personalise your food truck with trinkets that are unlocked by progress or purchased with in-game currency.
You can also rope in a friend for local co-op (which makes the game marginally easier, for the record), and divvy up the cooking tasks as you like.
Meanwhile, there’s complete rein to remap the controls whether you’re playing with keyboard and mouse, or controller. Promising 100+ hours of gameplay, you have over 380 levels to complete, and over 200 globe-spanning food and drink options to add to your menu. Honestly, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is so massive in scope, so completely customisable, it’s hard to talk about without becoming tangled in features. The celebrated eatery that your chef spent the past two games building up has been destroyed, and with the help of snarky and/or supportive rescue robots Whisk and Cleaver, you road-trip across a war-ravaged Remaining States of America, rebuilding your reputation one order at a time until you reach the Iron Chef Championships.
This is thanks to an admirably vast set of general settings and accessibility features.ĭriven by a stronger story than previous entries, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! jumps the CSD series forward to the year 2042, shifts all cooking action to a food truck, and hits the road. It’s jaw-dropping how customisable Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is, enabling everyone to shape their play experience, and satisfaction. Seriously, this third entry in the “hardcore restaurant sim” series from Vertigo Gaming successfully rejigs the franchise formula to serve a much wider audience, while still accommodating the niche tastes of genre enthusiasts. Even with its bizarrely punctuated title, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is one of the best games of the year. For South Africans, that’s all you need to know.
A cooking simulator that lets you make koeksisters, bunny chow and chakalaka.