Cook, Serve, Delicious! review

Developer: Vertigo Gaming Publisher: In-house Format: Android, iOS, Mac (version tested), PC Release: Out now

They never look happy. Even as you sweat, swear, fumble and panic your way through your customers’ food orders, serving perfect dish after dish. Even when you lay on pizza and burger parties, their glum faces festooned with balloon sculpture hats. Perhaps an undercurrent of Cook, Serve, Delicious! is that no one is ever happy, from the grubbiest schlub ordering a beer at 10am to the dapperest toff ordering a bottle of finest plonk.

Played against a superb loungecore soundtrack, Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a restaurant action-sim heavily based on Sony’s PlayStation title Ore No Ryouri, and related to the likes of Diner Dash and Cooking Mama. You make customers’ orders as fast and accurately as you can over the course of each day’s play, accruing money and Buzz – a stat that affects your restaurant’s footfall – that will take you from running a scruffy zero-star diner to a classy five-star dining room.

To get started, you’ll need to set up a menu, which initially comprises four slots. From salads to steak, you’ll need to buy each recipe; some require specialised equipment like deep-fat fryers that also cost money.

Menus demand some attention because of the different boosters and detractors each dish presents. Corn dogs are easy to make and give a small Buzz boost during afternoons, but they don’t win tips, are never ordered during rush hour, and their smell reduces Buzz in the morning. Nachos attract vermin and use more plates than other dishes, meaning you’ll need to spend more time on the chores of putting down traps and washing up which crop up during your working day. Many dishes are susceptible to ‘menu rot’, meaning that customers get bored with them, reducing buzz, so you have to constantly switch your menu around. Soup, meanwhile, gives all sorts of boosts to Buzz because it’s wholesome, but it’s a huge pain to prepare.

Preparation, after all, is the main course: you’re the one doing it. Soup is one of the hardest dishes because it comprises many different ingredients spread over two screens of options dependent on what kind of soup your customer wants, and some require chopping. Then the soup needs cooking, clogging up your preparation slot.

Food orders are displayed on the left of the screen; you’ll juggle up to four at a time in your zero-star diner at the beginning of the game, and a whopping eight by the time you’ve reached five stars. Each dish and chore requires a different set of actions; for a beer you must hold a key to precisely fill a glass to its frothy brim and hit enter to serve. Putting out the rubbish is right cursor and up, then S to wash your hands. A salad means matching the order from ingredients including cheese, ranch sauce, greens and carrots, bacon and croutons. Lasagne is a real pain, requiring three layers of pasta, sauce, cheese and parmesan.

And this is before you’ve upgraded any of them (at great expense, we might add), raising the sale price but often adding more ingredients with which to grapple. Even with just four slots on the go stress levels will be high, with the threat of botched orders, which reduce Buzz and your own morale. Especially during rush hours, and even more so when a food inspector is visiting to ensure you’re keeping the premises clean. Luckily you can upgrade your joint, adding air conditioning and snacks to make your customers more patient, and buying services that reduce the amount of refuse chucking and toilet flushing.

But these thin management options cover Cook, Serve, Delicious!’ real identity, which is all about StarCraft-style actions-per-minute technique. To begin with you’ll probably rely on the mouse to hit the icons, but it’s slow in comparison to a combination of keystrokes and mouse clicks. Lasagne: P, S, C, R, P, S, C, R, P, S, C, R, Enter. Wait for nine seconds, and serve. A favourite is fish, with a swift right, down, left on the cursor keys, S to season and Enter to stick on the heat.

This, however, is about it. Raising your restaurant from no stars to one requires 20 days (as well as fulfilling various other criteria) and each day takes about six minutes to play through. Making the thousands of dollars to buy the equipment, recipes and upgrades you need to make new dishes means saving up over many more days, giving a sense of grind – of work – to it all, despite the light presentation and a genuinely funny blend of the satirical and surreal in the daily email messages you receive.

And yet the flurry of action is gripping, the sense of satisfaction in chaining combos of perfect orders enormous. And the game knows it, layering the chance to bet against your performance to win big bonuses, testing your skills in Iron Chef competitions, or competing on the Steam leaderboards with specific menus. This is where the pleasure lies; curiously, there’s far less in developing the restaurant itself. For those who relish the heat, there’s much reason to get into the kitchen.

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