Overcooked! Special Edition
An excuse to link to “Too Many Cooks”
My college education had nothing to do with programming, let alone with anything that could earn a reasonable income. Despite my love for video games, I never took an elective video game design course. While I spent my college days writing poetry about toilets (no joke, and no, I will not hyperlink to them), I learned zilch about the 1s and the 0s. Thus, I have absolutely no idea how hard it is to program a game, specifically how to port one to another console. I still marvel that I can convert Microsoft Word documents into PDFs through a simple dropdown menu.
My ignorance does not stop me from expecting flawlessness from ports. Barring some changes to resolution and other cosmetics, a game should play the same on every system. Overcooked! Special Edition does not rise to my expectations. Again, I have no concept of how difficult it is to port a game, but difficulty does not excuse performance issues. With Overcooked, its ingenuity remains intact, but its sloppy execution on the Nintendo Switch nearly tears it apart.
What is it?
Whereas the Mario Party series ends friendships, Overcooked destroys romantic relationships. I am told this is a compliment. The key to ruining a relationship is cooperation, and Overcooked makes you cooperate more than a high school group project. You and up to three others are in charge of preparing meals in a set period of time. The more orders you fill, the more points you get, and these points translate into up to three stars at the end of the level. There is a story involving the end of the world, but this simply gives the game an excuse to throw you and your partners into the most dangerous cooking environments. Who knew fine dining was so popular in haunted houses, pirate ships, and moving vehicles?
The end of the world involves giant meatball monsters, copy/pasted fires, and dark textures.
The actual cooking takes inefficiency to a new level. In addition to dealing with the hazards of your workplace, you must identify how to best access all of your resources. Supply crates contain ingredients which often have to be sliced on a cutting board. The food is then placed in an oven or on a pan where it will cook until it is ready to be combined with other ingredients and sent out as a completed order. On top of this, you need to clean dishes, prevent any food from burning, and clear counter space for ingredients and other objects. Cooperation is as much about delegating responsibilities as it is staying out of each other’s way.
Apart from the main story mode, two DLC packs are included as well as a competitive mode. The DLC packs offer more stages with a jungle or winter holiday theme, and they feel like natural extensions of the main campaign. The competitive mode, meanwhile, pits two teams of two against each other to see who can attain the top score. If you have two or three players, whoever does not have a human partner can switch between their two cooks, just as you would if you play the normal stages by yourself.
What’s good?
- Overcooked is one of the best cooperative experiences on the Switch. Even with four people, there are enough chores to keep everyone panicking. Although there is a certain pleasure in running a chaotic kitchen, working as a coherent team of cooks provides maximum satisfaction. Playing with one, two, or three others player does not necessarily reduce the game’s difficulty either because with more players, more points are needed to secure that three-star ending.
- Each stage presents a challenging blend of time management and puzzle-solving. Few kitchens offer a simple route from food prep and delivery, so your first attempts will typically see you reviewing your resources and developing a plan. Then, as you execute the plan, you’ll undoubtedly screw-up at some point, freak out, and spend the rest of the level praying you get that last order in before time runs out.
- The gameplay never grows stale, largely in part to the gimmicks and unique layouts featured in the stages. Most levels are inventive enough to incentivize a second and third play-through, and more stages (even on top of the DLC) would have been welcome.
What’s bad?
- The porting sucks meatballs. Nothing about this game screams that it is too power-hungry for the Switch, so it is baffling why the frame rate fluctuates below 30 fps. Combine this with loose controls, and picking up a plate becomes more difficult than it should be. One of my friends could not stand to play the game with me because he found the flow of the gameplay so broken compared to the PC version.
- Playing alone is a kitchen nightmare (HA HA HA). Unlike Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time and Death Squared, Overcooked does not provide a control scheme to salvage a single-player experience. If you are alone, you still have two cooks to control, but you can’t move both at the same time. Instead, you bop between them, moving them from station to station and consequently creating gameplay jerkier than the framerate. This problem is present in the competitive mode as well if you don’t have a full team of four players.
- The ice levels are straight from a frozen hell. I have played enough ice levels in video games. We don’t need them anymore, and global warming should erase them forever. Slippery controls are a flaw in gameplay, not a video game mechanic. While we’re at it, lava levels should also be ashamed of themselves. Water levels aren’t present in Overcooked, but screw them, too.
Solomon hates this level, but he played it for your sake. Stare at it and recognize his sacrifice.
What’s the verdict?
If you have friends, go buy Overcooked and have a good time yelling at each other for your own mistakes. If you have a PC or another console, go buy it on that system and enjoy a smoother experience. If you have no friends and no other system other than a Switch, well…geez…Breath of the Wild is pretty good, right? As far as Overcooked goes, it’s fun and wacky enough to overcome some of its porting problems. It is by no means the best the Switch has to offer, but it belongs with the rest of the couch co-op and multiplayer games that have made the Switch a multiplayer godsend.
Arbitrary Statistics:
- Score: 7.5
- Time Played: Over 10 hours
- Number of Players: 1-4
- Games Like It on Switch: Lovers in A Dangerous Space Time, the Escapists 2