Have you ever wanted to own a food truck? Have complete control over the foods you make and serve? Have you ever wanted to craft a menu with both rice crispies and foie gras? Then Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? is for you. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? is the latest from developer/publisher Vertigo Gaming. The story is set in the backdrop of the food wars, the player being rescued by two charming and friendly robots (Whisk and Cleaver) out of the rubble of the Cook, Serve, Delicious! Tower. Knowing the brand and how tragic it is that the restaurant has been destroyed, the two offer their truck to be modified into the new face of Cook, Serve, Delicious as a food truck and you’re off to serve the world.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? has a lot of heart, and there is a tremendous breadth to the amount of items you have to serve to your customers, the customization options for the truck (which are purely aesthetic but provide great personality to the title), and the upgrades you can make to the food truck as you travel across the country. Gameplay is broken down into days, wherein you drive along a route and make various stops to serve guests. The player has some time before arriving to prepare dishes and get set up for the lunch rush, both with prep stations, and cooking special order meals and stowing them in warming containers. You don’t get too much time though, in fact, if this game requires anything from you, it is time management. Because that lunch rush hits hard.
An aspect of the game that I found equal parts confusing and compelling, is that for each route you are restricted to certain menu items. Some items are harder than others and have respective point values based on that. Some are special order, and some can be thrown in the fryer. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? brings the challenge of organizing these menus based on certain restraints. For example, you could have a route where the menu restriction is that you need six points total in difficulty, or that each dish needs to have a salad theme. This helps to keep the experience fresh and gives you, the player, freedom to play to your outs. The immersion is broken, though, by the option to serve dishes that you never see alongside one another, like ribeye steak and miso soup, or ice cream and Jambalaya. Call this a minor nit-pick, but I found it a little strange.
Speaking of strange, the setting and story are bursting with personality. From your two robot companions to the Mad Max style bandits that can attack your food truck. The dialogue between Whisk and Cleaver always brought a smile to my face, and the more that the world developed the more I was absorbed by the strange, sometimes absurd setting
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? has amazing groundwork, but I feel there is more that could have been done. For instance, I cannot ignore how much the gameplay feels like a mobile title. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? certainly has a lot more teeth than the average mobile game, however, I feel there are a lot of missed opportunities. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? sets itself apart by having specific button commands assigned to each stage of preparing a dish. While this made keeping up with the game’s frantic pace exciting, it often ended up feeling overwhelming trying to remember the different button combinations for different recipes. It also seems like a missed opportunity to not have utilized the Nintendo Switch’s touchscreen capabilities with this title. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It wants to take the style of the multitasking mobile genre and bring it to a new platform. However, it doesn’t separate itself enough to stand out, and some of the things Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? tries to do to break that mold only end up muddying the waters.
Conceptual issues aside, there are also some really obvious instances of screen-tearing between menus, which is unfortunate because the rest of the graphical content (specifically with regard to just how good the food looks) seems to be fluid and consistent. In tandem with the graphical and control issues, is the fact that some of the special orders required ingredients lists can be hard to read, this wasn’t a huge issue but did lead to me putting pickles on a few too many burgers when I didn’t need to
I really wanted to like this game, and it almost creates something really entertaining and easy to pick up, but the learning curve is inconsistent. While there is a feel of natural progression as you drive to new states, learn new recipes, and upgrade the food truck, the difficulty level does not seem to follow that progression. I feel you are thrown for the ropes a little too early, and I would have liked a touch more consistency in that regard.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is a hard dish to critique. It has soaring ambition, an up-tempo and driving soundtrack, and satisfying gameplay. Something just doesn’t taste quite right. For this top chef, it had everything the dish needed, but came out a touch underdone.
6/10
Check Out the Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3!? Trailer:
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is available for $19.99 USD (or regional equivalent) on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One consoles, as well as Windows PC via Steam, (check out our Early Access preview!), GOG, Humble Store, Green Man Gaming, GamersGate, Fanatical, and Nexus.
Nintendo Switch Review
I am a writer from Portland,Oregon who has loved gaming since early childhood. Writing and sharing about the best in visual arts is one of my favorite things. Some of my all time favorite games are: The Last of Us, God Of War (2019), Journey, Persona 5, Borderlands 2, and Shadow of the Colossus.
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