You know what they say, there’s a first for everything! Well, it’s definitely the first time we’re going to review something like Cooking Simulator. We’ve covered the most bizzare games, even before the PowerWave project, with the most insane premises, but never we would’ve thought of reviewing a game about… cooking and running a cuisine!
Oh well, let’s put our chef hat on, and see what this game has (wait for it…NdSpike) on the menu.

Upon starting the game, the main menu will offer you quite a good variety of choices. The one we will be looking at more in-depth, will be Career Mode, but first it is highly advisable you spend some time completing the various tutorials, as jumping head first into (especially) Career Mode will have the only outcome of leaving you clueless on what to do. Those tutorials will cover the basis on what you will actually do in your kitchen, from gathering and buying ingredients, to setting timers, spicing food, slicing fish… you name it, it’s there.

Once you’re done with that, you can “safely” jump into Career Mode, and taste (eheh. NdSpike) what the game has to offer. Alongside the aforementioned modes, you’ll also find Sandbox mode, where the game will literally let you do whatever you can think of in the kitchen with, as you may imagine, quite hilarious outcomes.

Career Mode will basically boil (eheh. NdSpike) down to this: You’ll be the newly recruited chef in the restaurant, and you will have to make it rise up into the gotha of multipled-starred restaurants. Easy right? Far from it, for various reasons. First up, you’ll be some sort of a one-man-army, having to do literally everything by yourself. Second, you’ll be also in charge of repairing broken equipment and managing all sorts of mishaps during your work shift. And lastly, to add salt (eheh. NdSpike) to an already spicy (eheh. NdSpike) situation, you’ll be evaluated for every single dish you make.

Come to think of it, calling the game “Cooking Simulator” might be a little bit of an understatement, as you’ll have to do quite possibly every single thing that you can think of inside of a kitchen, and all by yourself.

Here’s how the gameplay-loop ideally works: You start the day, start arranging your ingredients, your equipment and so on, in what is called the “Preparation Phase”. Once that’s out of the way, the proper work shift starts. During that, you’ll receive orders for various dishes that you’ll have to prepare in a set amount of time, before incurring in penalties while in the meantime receving even more orders. If your order’s complete, you will send it to the dining hall where the customers or the critics will eat it, and possibly tip you or review it. The final objective is to get better and better plates, so that yours and the restaurant’s fame all rise. In doing so, you’ll level up and also gain perks and skill points you can invest into abilities like being more stable while moving around the kitchen with a plate on your hand, discounted ingredients, sturdier equipment, and so on.

It’s a great way to keep the player invested in the game, and the perks ladder is definitely very interesting. We think it’s one of the very few instances where nowaday’s trend of inserting “light-RPG” mechanics into any game actually works.

The thing is, the more pressure the game applies to the player, the more the game starts crumbling under it’s own weight. Several things just don’t work properly in order to make Cooking Simulator a satisfying experience. The most glaring issue is that as we mentioned the game relies on fast and precise movements, which unfortunately, due to a combination of factors, the game quite can’t provide.

Even basic stuff like pointing your cursor to a switch to turn your oven on can be a frustrating experience, an experience made even more sour (eheh.NdSpike) when you have to do slightly more complicated operations like slicing up a potato in 10 pieces, or trying to tilt a bottle to pour some oil into a pan (which the game explains very poorly), or even just sprinkling salt or pepper onto a steak. The problem is, the controls’ sensitivity is absolutely all over the place, and the Joycons’ analog sticks short stroke isn’t going to make anything easier.

We tried using our Hori HoriPad (You can read our review here: https://powerwave83.art.blog/2020/04/22/hori-horipad-review-nintendo-switch/), and honestly it made everything “less worse” for lack of a better term, but the real problem here is definitely not just caused by your preferred way of playing. We surely can see how everything will work infinitely better while playing with a mouse and keyboard combination (don’t forget that this game was originally a PC game), but the real issue has to be searched in the absolute over-sensitivity of the controls, as stated above. Continuing with the negative points, we can’t avoid talking about the graphics. Your kitchen looks very previous-gen: Lots of jagged edges around everything, and lots of low quality textures. In all fairness though, we can say that food and ingredients, on the flipside, look fairly detailed.

Lastly, we tested the game in both handheld and docked modes, and we can say that at the very least, we never ran into any game-crashing bugs. We did notice another thing though: the game doesn’t feature any kind of auto-save function, so if for some reasons you have to quit your gaming session half-way through, you’ll have to restart from your previous save file. We learned that the hard way, during day-5 of our Career Mode run.

We have reached the end of the review. What should we make of this Cooking Simulator, then? At the current state, it’s hard to recommend it. If you are searching something different for your Switch library or you really, REALLY are a cooking fan, and really, REALLY crave something to take your passion out with you, then sure, go for it and you may have some fun with this.

Everybody else though, may get frustrated very, very fast.
We really hope that Big Cheese Studios comes up with a patch to solve or at the very least tone down some of Cooking Simulator’s problems because honestly, this game has quite a lot of potential, and it’s kind of a shame to see it held back by issues like these.

POWER-RATING:
5.0/10
“A game with a lot of potential, sadly held-back by technical issues.”

PROS:
-Very nice and interesting concept
-Great progression system
-Quite a lot of recipes to unlock

CONS:
-Control sensitivity is all over the place
-Plain, unrefined graphics
-No autosave?!

*Review copy provided by the Publisher
*Tested using the Hori Horipad for Nintendo Switch