Overcooked: Special Edition

Genre: Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Co-Op / Competitive (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This game’s content is included in Overcooked: All You Can Eat, along with Overcooked! 2.)

Overcooked Special Edition is an Arcade/Party game where up to four players are preparing meals in a kitchen based on simple recipes, selected based on specific orders from customers. However, as you progress through the game, you find that this simple task becomes increasingly difficult as the orders start piling up, the various cooking stations get crowded, and with each new kitchen presenting some new challenge.

And to be clear, these sorts of challenges range from kitchens that are too narrow for cooks to walk past one another and kitchens where the prep and cook stations are separated by a countertop, and kitchens where earthquakes occasionally split the kitchen in half, kitchens on a pirate ship rocking the countertops back and forth, and kitchens being actively raided by rats stealing ingredients.

Needless to say, the gameplay gets really frenzied and hectic, and at times it can be surprisingly difficult to do the simple task of chopping up vegetables, sticking the right quantities in a pot, removing it from the heat at the right time, and bringing it to the service counter.

Thankfully, this game was made for co-op play. Having extra hands helping in the kitchen allows players to split up tasks, although even then, there will be a constant need for communication and coordination. When players are at their best, they’ll be asking for ingredients like you’d expect workers in a real kitchen to be doing, and the feeling of a kitchen running smoothly in this game is something really special that far too few co-op games actually manage to deliver.

The game’s presentation is decent, albeit nothing impressive. The game manages to have a distinct visual style with simple visuals that do the trick, and that’s probably just as well, because a more complicated visual presentation would just make it difficult to parse everything that’s going on anyway.

In the end, Overcooked is an excellent frenzied, frenetic co-op experience, and arguably one of the best co-op games on the Switch. If you have multiple players wanting to work together and not necessarily competing, this is a fantastic game to do that with.

tl;dr – Overcooked is an Arcade/Party game where up to four players cooperate to try to prep and cook dishes to order in increasingly crazy kitchens. It’s a fast, frenzied experience that makes for one of the finest co-op experiences available on the Switch.

Grade: A

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