Cook Serve Forever… Where to begin with this one? The main game, Cook Serve Delicious! is a game of quick reaction and strong memorization. Back when flash games were at peak, enjoyment you would get from small browser games would actually satisfy you despite their simplicity. Same with Cook Serve Delicious! too, it was a rather simple game, built upon a simple premise. You own a restaurant and you make all the dishes. The way you deliver those meals to people would depend on time as well as your quick movements and memorizing the key inputs. As the day would go on, your orders would keep piling up and customers would ask for bigger meals.

That was the best part of Cook Serve Delicious! as a whole, you and your business with your management would grow bigger and as you kept making the different dishes, you would start getting used to your workplace. Of course, there would be some other issues, such as hygiene, taking out the trash, cleaning the restrooms and more footwork. They also did require button presses to be taken care of, giving you no break to rest. While getting into Cook Serve Forever, I was hoping to see the same bit of gameplay as well as have a great nostalgia for the simpler times. Unfortunately what I got was a dumbed-down version of a beloved game, made for people who clearly take things a bit easier than usual.

Cook Serve Forever is actually a story-ridden game instead of being a simulator like the previous entries. The story is as follows: Nori Kaga, our protagonist, is an inspiring chef, ready to take the biggest exams and trials to be the best. Since her childhood, she has been dreaming of being a top-grade, three-star chef and her mother, who “god rest her soul”, is a big role model for Nori. Brie, her significant other, is here to help with her journey to be our soulmate and act naughty from time to time. The bond between them is actually cute and charming, no words for that.

Chef Rhubarb, the world’s best and only three-star chef, is what we usually encounter in daily life of Nori. She actually has another huge role in the story because obviously, Nori wants to be as good as her, and we need to help her reach her goal. Luckily, a tournament made by Chef Rhubarb called “Couteau d’Or” is open for entries, and Nori has to work hard to impress Rhubarb in the competition. Though the story is a bit forward, it could have some other derailing encounters in order to keep itself interesting. The characters are fairly designed, and everyone has a likable voice, but the linear story about a street chef making it into the big game isn’t something unheard of. Oh, and on top of that it is set in a cyberpunk world because nowadays everything has to be cyberpunk in order to draw attention.

Helianthos, the city that is filled to the brim with hungry people, does require people like Nori to make absolutely fantastic dishes. Sadly, Helianthos is the only place you’ll be doing your job in, as the development team hasn’t announced any other places to work. The story is, again, linear and too short for now. At the first level, you have 14 places to unlock, from lower Heliantos to the palace where Chef Rhubarb is residing. All and all sounds good, but there was this small issue with the continuity of the story.

You see, there are very few dishes you can make for the people of Helianthos, ranging from hotdogs to burgers and sandwiches to chicken salads, and for the added bonuses, you can make eye-feasting desserts. But the fact that there is a very, very small amount of dishes to create makes it very repetitive, it also contributes to getting really boring real fast as well. As you progress and make it to the big scene, the dishes do not change, therefore you find yourself doing soft tacos in a gold-plated palace, which doesn’t suit the background whatsoever. There is currently a huge problem with the choices you are offered because frankly there isn’t any to begin with.

Now, the problem with Cook Serve Forever doesn’t end there. For some reason, the developers also butchered the gameplay. As I mentioned earlier, the gameplay used to consist of button memorization. In a restaurant of your own, when someone orders a hotdog, you have button presses for each action, such as having a bun, adding the hotdog, and so forth. K would be basically adding ketchup, and M would be mayonnaise, but then it would add an odd twist and bound O to mustard since the M button is already taken.

This way you would start to realize the letter O meant mustard and press accordingly. Developer Vertigo Gaming, do not know why but went completely in the opposite direction by making inputs only with arrow keys (or face buttons if you are playing with a gamepad). Every single ingredient has its own way of button combinations, sounds good at first, but once you memorize all of them, it becomes nothing but a boring QTE (a Quick Time Event) that you would find in a AAA game. As we all know, QTE action is only taken for a small part of gameplay, as it takes most of your actions to the minimum.

These QTE type of button presses are hard to get used to at first because there is an element of NOT pressing the button or long presses too. As much as it adds variety, once you get the hang of these additional sets of difficulties, they become easy to deal with. Talking about difficulty, this is another part where they have completely done it wrong and I cannot forgive them for it. Each shift, you can take an extra perk that would affect your end-day result.

If you happen to take harder difficulty, you get awarded extra EXP points to level up the current location’s popularity. However, most of the perks add literally ZERO additional bonuses such as slow or fewer customers or taking things a bit extra breaks if you are stressed. If the perks do add more experience points, they are usually about making dishes harder for you, such as inputs are now more convoluted or some ingredients are upgraded to the max, which means, again, their inputs are made hard to keep track of.

Cook Serve Forever is a game that I was looking forward to playing since I had some familiarity with the franchise. I was, to be brutally honest, disappointed with the overall presentation of it. Of course, there are some bits that I found to be pleasing, the UI is mostly clean, and the art style is quite good, especially the food. I mean, it has to be, right? After all, we are dealing with food here. It must be said that the story is a bit dull, but the relationship between characters was quite ordinary, which felt down to earth. For the rest of the stuff… Those really need heavy work.

To begin with, the gameplay is quite a sludge and gets repetitive real quick. There aren’t many recipes, progression is excessively slow, there is no earning money, or upgrades, the game doesn’t get any harder, the storyline is very much unnecessary for the series, the music choice is quite low, there is no endless mode and so forth. I haven’t talked about the fact that Cook Serve Forever is an early-access game, that means the content will be delivered in the future as you keep playing. Basically, you hope that the developers keep caring and have an interest in the title like the day they released the game. This is all an estimate by the way. Their roadmap shows promise with new recipes, characters, places to discover as well as a co-op game mode. But these are all planned for this holiday season, not a few weeks later.

Do I see any reason to get Cook Serve Forever right now? Well, I cannot say that I do. Currently priced at 30$, there is little content and you can finish the whole story within 4 to 5 hours of time. My advice would be getting Cook Serve Forever when the content updates start dropping through fall to winter. I am afraid to say that, for now, the lack of things to do really limits the game and you have to wait for developers to patiently build upon its universe and content.

Even if you happen to support the title because of Cook Serve Delicious, the gameplay or the vibe it gives off might not suit you. So it’s better to think twice before getting it. I would also rather say Cook Serve Forever is a spinoff of the series and works well as a standalone title, while Vertigo Gaming still needs to puta decent amount of effort into keeping it at the same level as the previous three Cook Serve Delicious games.

AtillaTuran
Editor, NoobFeed