Overcooked

Too many cooks might spoil the broth, but they also make for one hell of a party.

Cooking meals is very satisfying, but it can also be a real handful. The creative heads behind Ghost Town Games seem to be aware of this, as their couch-coop game Overcooked combines the most stressful and the most fun aspects of the restaurant life.

Up to four players each choose one of 12 (17 in the Special Edition) adorable little chef characters (including a robot and a fox) and then get right into preparing and cooking food, cleaning plates and serving dishes. With each level and each new, distinct kitchen, the cooking becomes increasingly difficult and the stakes (or the steaks) get higher. What starts with preparing simple soups in a run-of-the-mill diner kitchen in level 1.1, quickly evolves into frantically trying to keep track of the exact components for a pizza while fighting off waves of ingredient-stealing rats by level 2.2 or making burritos in a high-tech space station by level 5.1.

Overcooked's art style is very cute and fits its casual gaming experience. The controls are very simple and easy to get into, so players can concentrate on the game itself, which is hard enough as is. The multiplayer mode is perfectly well-rounded fun. Only the single-player mode, in which you simultaneously control two chefs, quickly becomes very boring, as teamwork (a.k.a. yelling at your friends to get you that damn missing tomato) is the single most important part of Overcooked's appeal.

While challenging, Overcooked can still be played in its entirety in a couple hours, even if you purchase the Special Edition which includes two DLCs. Depending on your platform, that might make it relatively expensive for the time it spans.

As of now, Overcooked is available on Xbox One (15,99€), Playstation 4 (5,99€), Microsoft Windows (15,99€) and Nintendo Switch (19,99€).

Tested in this review is the Xbox One Version (Special Version).

von Tessa 18 Jahre, Redaktion Köln 2 am 19.01.2018, Format: Spiel