Overcooked 2 Review

Many hands make hectic work:

The original Overcooked was an absolute delight that nearly tore my girlfriend and I apart. A couple of years later and here were are, still screaming at each other to “cut those digital carrots or so help me I’ll cut you.”

Story:

Sent on a mission to save the world from the un-bread menace – yes, you read that right, undead bread – you and a team of likeminded chefs must trek across Overcooked 2’s large map, cooking your way to a cure, hounded by a talking onion king and his pet dog, Kevin.

The story here is cute, funny, and mercifully brief. The real star of the show isn’t the game’s admittedly witty dialogue and so-bad-they’re-good dad-jokes, but it does provide a bit of levity to the otherwise raucous, non-stop and demanding action the game constantly throws at you elsewhere. There’s a certain beauty in having everyone breathe a sigh of relief after a tough challenge and have a chuckle at a zombie baguette.

Gameplay & Multiplayer:

You can play Overcooked 2 on your own, but I wouldn’t. Thus ends my review of the single-player portion of Overcooked 2: an utterly wrong way to play one of the best co-op games ever made.

No, Overcooked 2 was meant to be played with friends – though you may end up enemies. The core mechanic of Overcooked 2, much like the original, is to prepare a variety of dishes for impatient customers. These will require you to cook meat, boil rice, dice vegetables, avoid all the fire, prepare sushi, hurl ingredients over pits at your fellow chef, wash plates, survive a hot-air-balloon crash and so much more.

Overcooked 2 isn’t the most sensible simulation game, but it might just be the most enjoyable. Divvying up tasks on the fly to your fellow chefs and making sure everyone is tending to their own stations seems simple at first, and provides a gloriously satisfying loop when you and your team get a good rhythm going, but developer Ghost Town Games doesn’t care much for rhythm. Just when you think you’ve got the hang food prep and everyone feels comfortable with how their personal cog fits into the larger machine of your workforce, the building will shift, stations will move, players will get locked out of certain areas, or the kitchen will just explode altogether and form something entirely new. The best teams will know how to think on their feet and adapt to the cruel mistress that is Overcooked 2, and in my experience those teams are the ones that shout the loudest.