It’s needed too, because there are several hundred levels to play through in this game. Most of the upgrades are pretty noticeable differences, giving a solid sense of progression to the game. Your truck can be upgraded along your journey to protect yourself from attacks (that come with modifiers like knocking a holding station offline), increase customer patience, or even refresh food that’s spoiling. Another change is that the ancillary tasks like scrubbing the dishes are gone, which means you’ll be solely focused on preparing food. Other bulk foods can be cooked at a holding station to either be served or finished when you arrive, but they have a shelf life, so balancing when to cook in advance becomes part of the challenge. Special orders can be cooked and covered so they’re ready to serve when you arrive at your location. First of all, since you’re driving to the location you’ll serve food, you have time to cook on the way to each location. The story’s window dressing is minimal, but plays out in a few ways. The third iteration of the game has players running a food truck, driving to various stops in a post-apocalyptic world. Rather than hitting a key on the keyboard related to the name of the ingredient, you’ll have to pay closer attention to its A, X, B, Y equivalent. The balance comes in recipes where you have to choose specific ingredients from a larger list. On the PC, two four ingredient recipes might use very different key presses. Many dishes, particularly the early ones, require you to simply dump all of the available ingredients into a pot, pan, or other piece of cooking equipment, which is much easier when you know that regardless of what the recipe calls for, you’re just going to have to hit all the face buttons. In the grand scheme of things, it’s probably an acceptable trade off to make.
The PC version of the game often ties keybindings to the first letter of an ingredient (with some frustrating exceptions), the console edition maps each ingredient to a face button, which means you might have to also hold in a specific trigger to get the item you’d like any time you’re dealing with more than four ingredients.
I’ve played previous iterations of this franchise on the PC, so I was definitely curious about how the experience would translate to a controller. For many of the early orders, this can lead a player to a zen-like experience of hitting the sequences without much thought, but later orders require a much more active mental state, with optional ingredients that can drop customer satisfaction if missed or included unintentionally.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! takes the fevered cooking game on the road, which opens up a slightly different gameplay style while further refining the original gameplay concept along the way.Īll three of the games in the series amount to what is a frantic rhythm game as orders come in associated with specific sequences of button presses to complete.