A FEAST OF FUN
OVERCOOKED: ALL YOU CAN EAT (PEGI 3) Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox X, PC
★★★★I
I MAY not be a real-life kitchen whizz, but I’ve learned I can whip up a mean pizza under the intense pressure of a zombiefied carrot trying to break his way into the kitchen. The Overcooked series is just about the most fun you can have on your own in a cookhouse, and developers Team17 and Ghost Town Games are serving up an extra big helping in the form of All You Can Eat.
Packing together the first two games, plus all the additional DLC, this is the Kobe beef of co-ops. The premise is simple. You play as a couple of chefs in a kitchen, whipping up delicious dishes to feed the hungry patrons in your restaurant. The problem is that while the dishes are fairly straightforward, the kitchens most definitely are not. From travelators that pull you the wrong way, to disappearing walkways, and mutant, zombie veg, you have to pull out all the stops to get your fare from kiln to customer. Make the food fast enough, and you’ll gain enough stars to please the Onion King and progress through the levels.
Fail, and you’ll have to go back to the drawing board.
As fun as this game is to play alone, adding friends to the mix is the magic ingredient, working together with the other players, rather than trying to beat them. But of course, in trying to help your fellow food preppers, more arguments ensue – but that just adds to the fun.
Alongside Overcooked, and Overcooked 2 are all the extra levels that have been released for the game. There’s the Carnival of Chaos, where you try to build burgers, rustle up hot dogs, or fry doughnuts for hungry circus masses. It also sees you firing chefs out of a cannon, that essential kitchen utensil. Then there’s the Campfire Cook Off, which takes place in the woods and forests surrounding Onion Kingdom. From toasting marshmallows over a campfire, to preparing huge cooked breakfasts, this level really tests your skills. Ingredients are often carried around by the chefs in backpacks, meaning you have to race between the other chefs when gathering the foodstuffs you need to make the required dishes. There’s also rafting involved ... which did not end well for me.
Then there’s Surf and Turf, Too Many Cooks, Moon Harvest, and my personal favourite, Night of the Hangry Horde, which sees you racing through recipes in a bid to hold back the Walking Bread who have risen from their graves.
As the first and second game are packaged together, it was slightly jarring transitioning between the two. The refinements and tweaks made for Overcooked 2 are still missing from the original.
For example, in Overcooked you have to manually pass and place food to cook or prepare, while in Overcooked 2 you can throw ingredients into pots and pans, or to other chefs.
It’s not a massive problem, just a pain to have to keep remembering when you play the first game, and something that can cost you precious seconds.
As if all that wasn’t enough, All You Can Eat is being served up in glorious 4K – so your dodgy cooking can look sharper than ever.
Not only is this a great game for everyone, the developers have gone to great lengths to make it as inclusive as possible.
This game has scalable UI to make it easier to see, has dyslexia friendly text, and offers options for those with colour blindness. Fun for the entire family, this is the Holy Grill of co-op games, and for the hours and hours of entertainment it offers, it’s a steal at around £30.
■ Buy it: £29.95 at thegamecollection.net/