“Overcooked 2” Review

When it first came out in 2016, Overcooked‘s unquestionable combination of infuriating players while having fun ended up making the game one of the best party games this generation.  Overcooked 2 is more of the same, if not even more…

The joy of preparing Mexican food when random fires are smoldering your kitchen.

When it first came out in 2016, Overcooked‘s unquestionable combination of infuriating players while having fun ended up making the game one of the best party games this generation.  Overcooked 2 is more of the same, if not even more chaotic and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

What Is It?

If you thought the story to the first Overcooked was zany, Overcooked 2‘s plot is downright hysterical.  The tiny chefs are back to help out the Onion King once again, and this time they’re ridding the world of evil bread zombies.  Well actually, we’re not sure if they’re evil, but they’re definitely bread zombies.

Equipped with just your knowledge of cooking and a van that can transform into a boat or plane depending on the terrain situation, it’s up to you feed the Unbread in the hopes that they don’t take out the Onion Kingdom by making your way to kitchen to kitchen and serving the best dishes you can dish out.

Why Should I Care?

If you’ve never gotten into Overcooked before, as long as you can tolerate its silliness, you’re in for a treat.

The game’s mechanics are simple.  You can walk around, pick food or items up, and prep them either by setting them down on a cutting board to chop, throwing them in the mixer, setting the oven, and all sorts of simple stuff.

Not only is tossing your food a new feature, it’s a necessary strategy.

The gameplay flow simply has you prepping meals and getting them out to customers as quickly as you can.  So let’s take a burger for example.  The most complicated burgers in the game require a bun, a meat patty, some lettuce, and a tomato.  So when preparing a burger, you have to chop the vegetables, sear the meat, put those prepped items in a bun and plate them before setting the orders out.  Of course, you’ll also probably have orders that don’t require a tomato, so if you serve something that wasn’t ordered, you lose points.

Eventually things get more complicated.  One of the new items in the game is sushi.  For the most part, sushi orders will require chopped raw fish, sliced cucumber, and boiled rice wrapped with nori on a plate.  Sometimes people will order shrimp. Sometimes people skip out on cucumber.  It’s up to you and your partners to pay attention… all while making sure the dishes are also washed so you can constantly serve more.

All this said, doing well in Overcooked is all about paying attention to what needs to be served while also micromanaging your team to make sure everybody is doing the right thing.  You can play Overcooked 2 on your own and use the left shoulder button to switch between chefs, but no matter how you play, there’ll always be chaos.  Add the fact that you can nonchalantly just put some food items on the floor and actually cuss other chefs out in the game, and you have another party game that’ll make you want to hurt your friends in person just as much as you want to hurt them on the screen.

The main new feature in Overcooked 2 is the ability to throw things.  Longtime players of Overcooked know that as simple as the addition sounds, it just makes everything more bonkers.  To go along with it, the courses in the game also start to require it as well.  There’ll be kitchens on moving pickup trucks that’ll force you to throw tomatoes onto other trucks to get the other cooks to dice them before throwing them back.

Nobody actually talks about it, but the world map and your bus are definitely one of the more charming parts of Overcooked 2. Watching your bus traverse in water is awesome.

As we were playing in the office, the veterans in the series communicated pretty well about what needed to be done by each person, but as soon as the levels starting switching things up, the chaos ultimately became impossible to bear as everybody got mad at each other a lot especially considering we have quite a few perfectionists who want the 3-star rating in every level–I’m a trophy hunter, so you can bet that I was pretty intense as well.

Speaking of trophy hunting, for those that actually care about it, this something worth noting: When you play with other people on the couch who have their own PSN accounts and you perform objects that should unlock a trophy, everybody who’s signed into PSN gets that trophy.  This is the case with Overcooked 2.  If you’re playing with three other people who have PSN accounts, the only person that gets the trophy is the first person signed in.  I don’t know if this is the case with Steam and Xbox achievements, but it’s definitely an annoyance here.  None of this stuff totally breaks the gameplay experience, but it’s something I had to mention especially for you trophy hunters out there.

What Makes It Worth My Time And Money?

Aside from my seemingly personal issue about the PSN trophy support, the other issue I have is that there aren’t too many levels and you can probably run through the entire game in about four hours, more or less, depending on how much of a perfectionist anybody in your team of chefs is. If the first game was any indication, there’ll be a bunch of DLC at affordable prices when the time comes, and that only adds more value to it.

Overcooked 2 is every bit as fun as the original was, and both veterans and open-minded newcomers should definitely find a lot of enjoyment in this title as the summer comes to a close and parties start to simmer down.  Just don’t yell at your loved ones in the kitchen too much.