Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe

Genre: Action-Platformer / Match-4 Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Battle Chef Brigade has a story that takes place in a world much like the animes Toriko and Food Wars, where food is serious business. Or, for audiences less familiar with anime, it’s like Iron Chef… uh, but with monster hunting.

If that seems a little odd to you, let me reassure you that this game’s characters, story, and art style are all charming and make the strange concept feel natural, and allow you to focus on the gameplay.

For the most part, the centerpiece of the gameplay are one-on-one battles with other chefs, where each is looking to create the best dish or dishes to please the specific tastes of one or more judges. This is done with a tile-swapping puzzle game to combine ingredients into more potent forms. However, at the beginning of a battle, you don’t start out with your ingredients – you need to hunt them.

As such, during a battle, you will repeatedly leave the kitchen in a side-scrolling action-platformer where you’ll be using fighting abilities to hunt down various creatures and grab other ingredients you find, only to take them back to the kitchen while you see how your dish is doing.

It’s up to you to determine how best to spend your limited time – do you hunt for the finest ingredients? Spend more time in the kitchen refining your dish? You have to do some of both, but the exact balance is in your hands.

The puzzle gameplay in this game is a simple affair that becomes more complex as more elements are added – things like bones and even poisoned ingredients become an issue you have to deal with later in the game, and the simple gameplay helps to make it easier to tackle these problems as they arise.

Meanwhile, the action-platformer gameplay is fun, as you punch, kick, combo, and throw kitchen knives at strange beasties to get their tasty meats, or find other interesting ways to make use of it – let a flying monster eat an ingredient you dropped, and it will drop an egg, a completely new ingredient… or maybe you let that egg hatch to get another monster to take out. Or you could head straight for the toughest, boss-like enemy to get the rarest ingredient.

If I had one complaint about this game, it’s that it is absolutely begging for a multiplayer mode so two players can go head-to-head. Hell, the game is even set up to highlight versus battles, so the lack of this feature is glaring.

However, despite this omission, all in all this game is a strange brew that’s a fusion of quality ingredients that makes for a unique and refreshing title that’s eclectic in all the right ways. Definitely worth a look for fans of the respective genres.

tl;dr – Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe is a delicious combination of color-matching puzzle gameplay and action-platformer that is both unique and a lot of fun. It’s just missing a multiplayer mode to make full use of all of the great gameplay that’s on display here.

Grade: A

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