Overcooked 2

A second helping of madcap meal-making in the entertaining, but familiar, Overcooked 2.

Some of the level gimmicks are much better than others

Like the original, Overcooked 2 is a cheerful, nonviolent co-op game that’s simple enough for the whole family to enjoy. It also happens to be one of the most stressful games you’ll ever play. This sequel adds a generous helping of new ingredients, but at its core it’s the same game: One that, for all its fantastical elements and wilfully counterintuitive working environments, captures the pressure-cooker tension of a busy restaurant kitchen. As before, your goal—whether you’re playing alone, or with up to three other chefs—is to successfully serve as many dishes as you can within four minutes: chopping, mixing, frying and steaming ingredients according to the recipe. There’s a wider variety of orders this time, including sushi and nuggets and fries but the processes themselves are still very simple. Multitasking so you can fulfil as many orders as possible in good time is where it gets tricky. On top of that you’ve got stage hazards that force you to adapt your processes, and that’s when your careful planning starts to fall apart.

One of the big changes this time is that you can now throw raw ingredients, whether they’re fresh from the pantry or just chopped. Often it’s simply a useful time-saver, but sometimes you’ve no other option: on one stage, your ‘kitchen’ is actually two rafts hurtling down a river, while another forces you to lob items back and forth between a pair of hot-air balloons. Elsewhere, a rotating partition can split you up from a fellow chef, forcing them to pass over a half-completed dish so you can finish the job. It’s incredibly satisfying to find your range and lob a patty into a pan— or a tortilla directly into the hands of your partner to finish one final burrito with a second to spare. In reality, you’re as likely to end up inadvertently lobbing some tomatoes away in your confusion. That it’s mapped to the same button as ‘chop’ is a stroke of evil genius.

It’s a reminder that there’s a degree of awkwardness baked into Overcooked that can frustrate, but is ultimately the making of it. The interface is far from perfect: each dish is a mass of icons, sometimes obscuring whatever’s in the space next to it. As such, it can be a struggle to tell when you’ve inadvertently taken a pan off the heat too soon, or why the game won’t let you put one ingredient on a plate with something else. But that’s the point. Kitchens are cluttered, chaotic places. If it was neater it wouldn’t be nearly as funny: there would be fewer moments where you accidentally put fried meat in the sink, or place a saucepan of rice in the wrong place and wonder where the cheese has gone.

Hell’s Kitchens

But much of this was true of the original, and Overcooked 2 doesn’t quite do enough to prevent it feeling more like an expansion than a sequel. Some of the level gimmicks are much better than others, too. An outstanding early stage starts you off in a balloon, which plummets from the skies and crash-lands into a sushi kitchen mid-level, forcing you to adapt to a new layout and different recipes. By contrast, a haunted castle where spirits lift and carry a trio of chopping boards—refusing to let you grab them for several agonizing seconds—is mostly just annoying.

Online play, meanwhile, is slightly underwhelming. The implementation is fine—public and private matches are available in both the standard arcade and competitive versus modes, letting the lobby vote from the six level themes. And it’s far better than cooking on your own. But it’s not quite the same as when you’re sharing couch space and screen space with three others. Functionally it’s not much different with strangers, but Overcooked was made for good-natured bickering with people you know. As long as you’re cooking with friends, you’ll have a riotous time with a sequel that still offers one of the most deliciously chaotic multiplayer experiences on PC.

verdict

Do you have a long online friends list, but are short of local multiplayer pals? This safe and solid sequel was made for you.

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