The tough-as-nails cooking sim is back!  In the last game I reviewed, you cooked food in restaurants inside a high rise building, from a lowly stall in a food court all the way up to a swanky establishment.  And now you’re taking it on the road with food trucks in the sequel.  Cook, Serve, Delicious 3?! is available for nearly all current game consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

This game actually has a story, but it’s a pretty dumb one.  Normally story in a game like this doesn’t matter to me, but this one is just unnecessary.  Anyway, it’s 2041 and the US is ravaged by war.  The building from the last game has just been blown up, and you are saved from the wreckage by two android ladies in a rescue van.  They see that you are the famous chef from the last game, and decide to turn their van into a food truck and help you serve food all across the country.  The rest of the game really doesn’t reflect this kind of plot, so it’s really not needed.  All the story should be is you’re just cooking dishes in a food truck, that’s it.

But the story is the least of the game’s problems.  Each level is a day and you pick your destination route and have time to prepare dishes while you’re driving.  The only problem is that you don’t know what your customers will want at the stops, so you could have a bunch of things prepared in reserve that you don’t need.  You can still fix food while you stop and customers are waiting, and you prepare it like in the last game.  You must hold down the L2 button to select dishes, then while doing that you press certain face buttons to add ingredients and other steps.  Once food is cooked, select it on the left side of the screen to serve to customers.  Serve a bunch to customers without waiting too long to earn combo points.  By the end of the day you can earn medal rankings depending on how you did.  While the controls are a little better than last time, I still think they are needlessly complicated and really make the game hard.  Maybe this style of gameplay works better on PC.  There is a co-op mode but thanks to COVID I have less opportunities to try it.

As you play, you’ll earn experience points and when you get enough, you can upgrade and customize your food truck, which is neat.  The food you prepare is somewhat photorealistic and makes me hungry, and they also have interesting facts on each dish in the catalog.  I also like that you can pick between Standard and Chill difficulty settings.  Chill removes the patience meter from customers and also takes out food truck attacks, but the controls still make it hard and you can’t earn anything higher than a silver medal.  Aside from the difficulty, the other main problem I had was the instructions are not very good.  Sure there are tutorials, but at one point you must choose food for that day’s menu and must pick a combo that’ll fill a point meter.  To do that you must buy new dishes, but the game doesn’t tell you how to do that.  Game developers, if you’re going to make a downloadable only game with no manual, you’d better make the instructions very explicit.

Kid Factor:

Cook, Serve, Delicious 3?! is rated E-10 with ESRB descriptors of Alcohol Reference and Mild Violence.  You do cook some dishes with alcohol, and I guess the violence comes from the building being blown up in the beginning of the game.  Reading skill is needed for the text, and younger kids may get frustrated at the difficulty.

Tags: Game Reviews