After I and my friends finished Micro Mages, we decided to boot up Overcooked. I was initially worried that this game wouldn’t be my forte, that I would drag my team down. Instead, I found that the base elements of this game are simple enough for just about anyone to manage and winning is all about teamwork. When we failed, we failed as a team, and when we succeeded, it felt like a real achievement. Overcooked is a game with a few kinks that does a great job of testing the players’ ability to cooperate in a fun way.
Remember, this review reflects my experience and therefore everyone else’s as well. If you disagree with any point I bring in this post, then you should reflect on your opinion until you agree with me as I am correct and you are wrong. Thank you for reading!
Controls
The controls of Overcooked are simple enough. If you want to interact with anything be it picking up an ingredient, putting an ingredient in a pot, throwing the contents of the pot in the trash, you point towards the wanted object and press the interact button. It can get hard to interact with the correct thing when you’ve covered the floor in burrito ingredients, but this just encourages the players to keep their work area organized; so try putting a different ingredient in each corner of the floor.
To go more quickly, you can perform a dash which makes you go super fast for a split second. This maneuver is great for delivering one final dish before the end of the time limit, but it also knocks any other players out of the way, requiring communication in some levels, especially in the ice world (I’m talking about you 6-3!!!!). After finishing all the dishes we could realistically do in the time limit, we would often start dashing constantly while spinning towards each other to have a little Beyblade battle.
Personally, I like the simple control scheme of this game. It’s easy to understand and anyone can pick it up. If I had one complaint, it’s that movement is a little too slippery for my liking. I’m sure this was intentional to make the game feel more chaotic, but I found it made it hard to interact with the right item which could be frustrating.
Level Design
Despite the simple controls, Overcooked is not an easy game. Every level has a kitchen layout more convoluted than a convolution. Everything is always in the wrong place and no normal person would ever stand for it. It gets so hard that in the later stages, my team would play each level once, knowing that we wouldn’t win just to see what the level looked like and formulate a plan. Each time we entered a level with a new recipe, mechanic, or an outrageous number of conveyor belts, a little shiver went down my spine.
The levels do a good job of giving each player a chance do each job. No player is ever going to be stuck on dish-washing duty every level because half the time, the sink will be literally inaccessible to that player, and most levels require every player do multiple jobs anyway.
While I like most of the levels, a few decisions seem just unfair. There are many recipes that you can make by accident that are never used in the entire game. For example, you are never required to make a soup with multiple types of vegetables, but it doesn’t stop you from putting them in. You are also able to put meat in the pot to cook, which caused a lot of confusion and forced us to reset in one level. I looked up a play through of the game and the exact same thing happened to the group I was watching. I think that all unused dishes like this should have been taken out of the game.
The most impressive thing about the level design is how the game rewards the use of well thought out strategy. Multiple times, my team played a level and felt confident in our performance because all of us were busy but not overwhelmed the entire time, yet we still didn’t get all 3 stars. When this happened, we would talk as a team and decide on a game plan for our next attempt, then all of us would feel even less busy than the first attempt, yet we would get even more dishes out and earn all 3 stars. It’s a magical thing in games when player-created strategies are rewarded like this.
Difficulty
Overcooked is not an easy game. The levels get so complicated that it will activate you and your friends’ fight or flight response. For me, when too much was going on and I didn’t know what do do, I would literally freeze and just look over the screen like “what do I do?” Despite this, I liked the level of difficulty. Like I said, I enjoyed coming up with strategies as a team and successfully using them. However, I think the game was probably too hard for more casual groups. The number of stars you must have to unlock the levels in world 6 is brutal and really slowed down the momentum we were having, so I expect other groups to have even more trouble. I could be entirely wrong about this however; it could be that more casual players can get good at any level in world 4 or 5 with just a couple more tries than it took us.
Score
I feel like I wrote a lot of things in this review that made my experience with the game seem stressful. This is one-hundred percent true, but in a good way! Stress can be a positive, especially when it is completing something difficult with friends. Going in, I didn’t think I would like this game one bit. It looked too hard to me, like something I could never do even with help. I was pleasantly surprised when discussing strategies and communicating effectively made even the hardest of levels go smoothly. Overcooked tested my group’s cooperation in the best of ways, and I’m sure we will take on the sequel some day soon.