Overheat: Kitchen Chaos

Genre: Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

The Overcooked franchise has made a name for itself as a shining example for other games to follow when it comes to the question of how to make a co-op game. As you imagine, the game’s success has spawned numerous imitators, including this year’s PlateUp! which adds Roguelike elements to make something new and interesting. Of course, not everyone wants to make something new and interesting. Some publishers just want to churn out something similar and ride the coattails of the more well-known game’s success. And wow, does Overheat: Kitchen Chaos do that.

To say this game is a shameless copycat is not doing justice to just how much this game wants to trick people into thinking this is Overcooked. The title, the art style, the character designs, and the core gameplay are all clearly cribbing notes from Overcooked in ways that make it seem like this game might be tempting legal action. But of course as always I need to fall back on my standard for copycat games, which is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a copycat as long as it’s a good copycat. So, is this obvious, blatant, shameless copycat of a game a good copycat?

No. Heck no. Absolutely not.

Let’s start with the presentation, the one element it doesn’t completely ruin. Apart from the clearly unoriginal art style, this game’s 3D art is… fine. Not good, but it’s decent enough. I do think this game does a poor job of indicating what its food items look like, and the symbols associated with them. And the soundtrack is embarrassing in how it tries to be a poor man’s version of Overcooked’s soundtrack. But this is all serviceable.

As for the rest… where do I even start?

Well, let’s start with the menus, before you even get into a game. What a mess. Given that this game, like Overcooked, is focused on co-op, I went into this with a friend with the intention of testing that out primarily. We immediately found the interface for selecting a character to be cumbersome and needlessly confusing, and this was followed by a loading screen, and then an obligatory tutorial that only supports a single player, forcing me to change my player count and restart again, getting another loading screen. Upon completion of the tutorial (more on this in a moment), I figured I could go back to playing in co-op, but the game still had me in single-player, so I needed to exit back to the main menu to select that again. More fiddling with the character select, another loading screen… and then the game wanted me to do the tutorial again – apparently the first time hadn’t marked it as being cleared. So I went through the above process again, actually jumped into the first post-tutorial level, and then exited back to the main menu to get into a co-op game.

I am getting frustrated just typing all of this out, so you can imagine how upset my group was putting up with all of this.

Speaking of the tutorial itself, it’s terrible, often not indicating what you need to do to move on – for example, at one point a recipe in the tutorial called for honey, and the game didn’t make it clear that the honeycomb needed to be chopped up at a workstation and then the liquid honey carried by hand (ew) to the mixer. Plus, when you go to do the next thing, you’ll naturally be pressing a button so you can do it, but if the tutorial window pops up when you’re about to press it, you’ll clear the window before you can read it.

When you get to the gameplay itself, this is pretty much just Overcooked, but with a lot less polish and a lot more jank. The controls are stiff and clunky, and the game oddly makes it so that levels don’t have you getting as much done as you can within a time limit, but doing a set number of tasks as fast as you can. And that would be okay, except the early levels only have you making one or two dishes and that’s it. This absolutely ruins the game’s flow, forcing the player into more menus and loading screens when you should be just continuing to play the game.

Overheat is a slipshod, poorly-made attempt to cash in on Overcooked, its $8 price tag clearly just there so it can look like a deal when it drops to a sale price of $2. But please, do not buy this. There isn’t a single original idea in this game, from the presentation to the gameplay, and everything it does is a worse version of a much better game that already exists. What’s more, the busted menus and broken tutorial will waste your time and, if you’re actually trying to play this with others as you might expect to do, you’ll be wasting their time as well. Is Overcooked more expensive than this? Yes. But if you want to play Overcooked, you should just get Overcooked. Don’t waste even $2 on this con job of a game that tries to pass itself off a low-cost alternative.

tl;dr – Overheat is a co-op focused Arcade-style Party Game that copies everything it does from Overcooked, and does so very, very badly. Even the menus and tutorial in this game are broken. Do not spend a single cent on this scam of a game.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Game, Laziest Copycat

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