Rishabh Borde
Out of all the conventional themes for management sim games, cooking has always been a rather popular one. While cooking in real life is considered meditative and relaxing by many, cooking management sims such as the ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious!’ games can be quite the opposite.
In fact, if you are anything short of a genre veteran you can expect to be frustrated and stressed for large parts of your opening hours in the game. However, with the learning curve, comes the oh so delicious satisfaction of a job well done, particularly if you are culinarily inclined.
While the first two ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious!’ games were fairly well received at the time, they both had some limitations that developer Vertigo Gaming is keen to address in the upcoming third installment of the franchise. Read on to find out everything we know about ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3’.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3 Gameplay: What to Expect?
The ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious!’ franchise is a series of cooking and restaurant management simulation games where you play as the chef and sole proprietor of a restaurant. You are given specific orders for food items by customers who visit your enterprise, and you are tasked with preparing said food items within a stipulated time frame and up to a certain quality standard.
This is done by performing a set of predetermined actions in a specific order to prepare the individual components of a dish and assembling it all together in a requisite manner before serving. For example, if the player is tasked with cooking up a hamburger, they must first individually cook the burger patty and then assemble it with other ingredients such as buns, tomatoes, cheese, lettuce, bacon, and so on, before serving. Besides cooking itself, the player is also tasked with various other kitchen maintenance tasks including cleanup and sanitation.
While this premise is simple enough, the difficulty can ramp up fast as you unlock new recipes and the time constraints become stricter. You will find yourself having to juggle multiple orders and tasks while prioritizing adequately in order to achieve a sufficiently high enough score. Failing to fulfill enough orders satisfactorily can lead to the restaurant’s reputation being harmed.
While the original ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious!’ was rather limited in its scope, ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2’ expanded on the original, with a slew of improvements including six times the recipes, restaurant customization, distinct food classifications and the “Chef for Hire” system, which is basically a carousel of over thirty themed restaurants that the player gets to cook at.
The upcoming ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3’ is set to be an even bigger evolution, compared to the second game. The most immediately notable change is the change in setting. Unlike the first two games in the franchise where you were in charge of your own restaurant, ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3’ puts you in the driver’s seat of your very own food truck with a steadfast robot crew, making numerous stops across a war-ravaged future version of America and competing in the prestigious National Food Truck Championship.
The Steam page for the game describes it as follows:
“Hit the road in this massive sequel to the million-selling Cook, Serve, Delicious! series as you travel across the United States to participate in the Iron Cook National Foodtruck Championships with your trusty robot crew Whisk (voiced by @negaoryx) and Cleaver (voiced by @havanarama).”
With the change in setting also comes a few crucial modifications to the gameplay formula. Series creator Dave Galindo claims that the new setting also means stripping away some of the franchise’s ancillary mechanics, namely the side dishes first introduced in ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2’ and chores. Presumably, the idea is to streamline the game mechanics and focus more on the cooking part rather than the cleaning part.
‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3’ also features a narrative-driven story mode, this time with fully voiced characters and cutscene animations. This is certainly a big upgrade over the previous games, where the story was mostly dispensed via text-based exposition. On your hazardous journey across dystopian America, you will be joined by your robot bodyguards Whisk and Cleaver.
The new game will feature a single-player as well as a cooperative multiplayer mode, with the option for local split-screen co-op.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3 Developers: Who Are the People Behind the Game?
‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3’ is being developed and published by indie video game development studio Vertigo Gaming. Besides the ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious!’ franchise, Vertigo Gaming is best known for games such as ‘The Oil Blue’, ‘Spirits of Metropolis’ and ‘The Sandbox of God’.
The series was created by David Galindo, who also serves as the lead programmer and game designer for ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3’.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3 Release Date: When and Where Can I Play It?
‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3’ is set to enter Steam Early Access in January 2020, with a full release expected sometime later in 2020. The game has been confirmed to be arriving on a number of platforms including PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 4, Xbox One and the Nintendo Switch.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3 Trailer:
You can watch the trailer for ‘Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3’ right here.
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