For the record, that’s not hyperbole. Scary things are a lot less scary when you have a buddy, and an extra player tends to massively reduce the difficulty of action games (especially when the AI isn’t built to handle them, like in Hellpoint). So when you have a frantic party game that scales its level requirements based on the number of players to consistently come down to the wire, it becomes more exhilarating than mowing down endless mooks.
The premise of Overcooked! 2 is simple: you are chefs in the worst-designed kitchens ever imagined, and need to cook dishes to score as many points as possible in a limited amount of time.
Recipes are streamlined abstractions of their real-life counterparts. For instance, dumplings only have two ingredients: flour and a filling. All you need to do to cook them is chop the filling, mix it with the flour in a mixer, then steam it. No wrapping, no vegetables, no seasoning, nothing else. Heck, you don’t even need to worry about sanitation. Drop your food on the ground, chop veggies on the same cutting board as raw meat, whatever! Sky’s the limit! (Unless you count the outer space levels.)
While cooking these kinds of simplified dishes might sound simple, there are two main hiccups. First, as mentioned, you are in the worst-designed kitchens in the world. (There is a level where the kitchen is split up between two sides of a street. A STREET WITH CARS.) Navigating the various hazards can make preparing even pickle in a cup a daunting task. Second, there are more tasks than people, meaning balance and coordination is required for success.
Most cooking processes in the game take time to complete, and either require your chef to stand there performing it (such as chopping), or progress on their own but go bad if left unattended for too long (such as mixing). However, many ingredients and processes also have unique quirks to them. For instance, ingredients can be added to mixing mid-way—so, for instance, if you were preparing dumplings, rather than chopping the filling and then mixing it with the flour, one player can begin to mix the flour (yes, alone) while the other chops the filing, and then add the filing to the mixed flour. For many levels, getting three stars requires figuring out and taking advantage of these special properties.
You’re awarded a number of stars based on how many points you earn. Initially the maximum is three, but after clearing a world you can unlock four stars each level. While getting three stars is typically a decent challenge, jumping from three to four stars often requires a massive increase in points that we just didn’t bother ever attempting.
At least, that’s how most levels function. There are also a set of levels called horde levels, which involve cooking food to fend off hordes of unbread. (The overarching story of the game involves collecting recipes to be able to cook enough food to stave off the unbread invasion.) In horde levels, the kitchen will have a number of boarded-up exits that unbread enemies approach, each of whom wants a certain dish. Each enemy will attack their doorway until given the dish they desire. Rather than earning enough points, the goal is to just survive the attack.
It’s an interesting concept, but easy and lacking in depth. You earn points for delivering meals and can use those points to repair doorways, and the points and damage are calibrated in a way where it was never an issue to keep all doorways at full health. Additionally, horde levels sometimes feature locked gates that need to be unlocked with points. So there was one or two horde levels that were tricky at the beginning as we had to race in a limited kitchen to earn enough points to unlock the gates, but once the full kitchen was unlocked the level was a breeze.
You can play with up to four people, but as they say, too many cooks spoil the broth. While more bodies means more processes going on at once, the point requirements for stars scales with the number of people, and space in the kitchen is often at a premium, so more people means getting in each other’s way more. You can also play solo, where you have two chefs you can swap between, but Overcooked is a party game, so I’m not sure why you’d do that. (For the record, I played all levels two-player.)
Speaking of having too much of a good thing, I think the DLC levels are in an interesting spot. When I finished the base campaign of the game, I still wanted more. But there are a lot of DLC levels, and by the middle of them I had had my fill…. And then the end of the DLC has some of the best level design in the game, grabbing my interest again. So whether intentional or not, it felt like the game slightly overstayed its welcome but still ended on a positive note.
Additionally, there is an exploit you can do on certain levels. In levels that introduce a new dish type, the timer for the level won’t begin to run until you turn in the first dish. What this means is you can prepare as many ingredients and dishes as you want without any time pressure. It’s a nice little feature to give you some extra breathing room to figure out new dishes, and only possible on a fraction of levels. The issue is that the “exploitable” DLC levels seem to have inflated point requirements that anticipate you will—or even possibly require you to—use this exploit. Grinding out dishes with no time pressure isn’t fun, it’s busywork, so being forced into that was a bit annoying.
As for the level design, I generally liked it. I think levels can broadly be divided into two types: levels where the chefs are partitioned into separate areas, and levels where everyone can access everything. I liked the latter a lot more than the former. The fun of the game comes more from figuring out the strategy for each level than actually executing said strategy. However, the “partitioned” levels already do most of the strategizing for you, since you just need to do whatever tasks are in your partition. Some levels also have obnoxious design, forcing you to sit around waiting for unavoidable hazards to move out of the way. Being pulled in four directions at once due to all the tasks that need to be done is hectic and fun, waiting for the game to allow me to use the oven is boring and aggravating. (There’s also a bug in one level where the ingredient bins are invisible. Have fun memorizing which ingredient is where!)
That being said, a lot of the level design is wonderful. There is just enough complexity and chaos that the tasks that need to be done are sliiiightly too numerous to cleanly divide. So you have a decent rhythm going—but dirty dishes are piling up in the sink, or there aren’t enough ingredients getting chopped, and you need to figure out how to compensate without throwing everything else off. While some levels have surprises that come out of nowhere, I loved the ones with mechanics that are presented upfront and seem simple, but can lead to unexpected results in practice. My favorite example: there is a level with a partition on a turntable that periodically rotates 90 degrees, causing the level to alternate between being divided horizontally and vertically. I handled the left (when vertically partitioned) and top (when horizontally partitioned) sections, while my friend managed the right and bottom sections. All was going well… until the turntable rotated an extra time. Suddenly, I was on the right side and my friend was on the left! We were spontaneously forced to swap roles—without missing a beet (not a typo), lest we fail the level.
One element of the game that I found fascinating is the fact that all chefs are mechanically identical but, because managing different parts of the cooking process require different skills, different people can still be better-suited for different roles. There were some levels where we were sure we had the correct strategy, but just couldn’t beat it no matter how many times we tried—and then got three stars in one attempt by swapping who was responsible for which task.
Overcooked! 2 is a charming, silly, intense party game. It will draw you in with its silly humor and over-the-top antics, but every once in a while you will take a step back (WHY DID THEY BUILD A KITCHEN ON TWO SIDES OF AN ACTIVE STREET), which only serves to highlight the absurdist humor. The game is tense and requires real coordination, but levels are short enough that failing isn’t a hassle. There are a few bits that maybe didn’t quite cook properly, but Overcooked! 2 is overall a delectable dish.
I don't have anything to say about the game (though it sounds fun), but "the unbread" is a great pun.
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