Overcooked! 2 Review

The salad missed the tomato! The burrito is burnt! The meat on the burger is overcooked! And the kitchen is full of chaos! It's not a great couch co-op game without some scream and teamwork included. Two silly players enter the kitchen, serving foods and drinks to an unknown customer in an absurd kitchen. This is what peak co-op game looks like that is created by Team 17 alongside Ghost Town Games. Overcooked! 2 is the main sequel to Overcooked! game and it was released on 7 August 2018 for Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

You pick one to three of your friend into a call and invite them into the Overcooked! 2 lobby. Grab your controller and start to serve meals in a crazy kitchen. The game started in a cutscene in the Onion King's Castle, where he makes a mistake and revives the unbreads (a zombie bread). The Onion King looks in panic and orders you and your friend(s) to feed the unbreads before they attack the castle.

Entering the tutorial, we're going to serve our first lettuce. Starting with me picking up the lettuce from the box and give it to my friend. My friend chops the lettuce and gives it back to me to be served. After serving our first chopped lettuce, the order becomes harder with the combination between chopped lettuce and tomato. As we both just following the tutorial's instruction, we notice that the unbreads order just rain down on us and we just serving dozens of fresh salads to the unbreads.

As the tutorial ends (indicated by the timer ends) the unbreads are just too ravenous and cannot be satisfied. The Onion King order us to retreat to the castle and tell us to explore the world to learn more appetites. The Onion King also wants us to improve and cooperate better at the kitchen where of course, it's not going to happen in the further. It is a simple bite-sized story for everyone to follow, but behind all the simple stories comes an amazing gameplay experience.

As you walk away from the castle, you enter a bus where you can control to takes you to the first level 1-1. As you play, you learn how to cook sashimi, sushi, pasta, and many more as you follow the level. At some point, you'll learn how to wash dirty plates so they can be used again for another order and learn how to dash. The kitchen layout started to get a bit absurd at 1-4 where there're conveyor belts that mess with your movement so you need to dash to fight the movement of the conveyor belt's direction.

As you play, you progress through the level and you learn a lot of appetites through many kitchens. There are a total of 6 worlds, each world consists of 6 levels, so a total of 36 levels in the main story, not to mention there are 8 hidden levels called "Kevin Level" that can be unlocked by certain conditions. With the tutorial level, bringing the grand total of 45 levels of chaos. I just want to point out that there are a lot of levels and the effort to make every single level are different and unique are so incredible, so big thumbs up for the developers.

As I mention before, there are dozens of levels with every kitchen that are unique from another. The mechanic of the kitchen is what makes the kitchen is unique and fun to play with, for example like portals, moving platforms, elevators, and many more. With the introduction of every new kitchen mechanic at some levels, the timer will freeze until we serve our first meal. This gives us time to learn the new mechanic of the kitchen and plan a new strategy to serve food and get that three stars.

You will create a new strategy at every kitchen you'll encounter. The kitchens were never the same, even the mechanics are recycled for a lot of the levels, we never get bored and always having fun with whatever the kitchen looks like. As the level becomes harder, it is also become harder to communicate with your friend on the other side of the kitchen since all the chefs need to be on the same page to serve the meal.

As you serve the meal, the score at the bottom left of your screen will add up. If you follow by the order from left to right, you will get a tip for an extra score. On the result screen, the score will get translated to stars which show how good you and your friend(s) working together. I'm sure if you put work into the game to communicate, it will be an easy three-star. If you have done with the game and finished the last level, the fourth star appears on every level to be completed. The fourth star is a no joke, you need to be perfect as possible with zero mistakes made. Me and my friend can spend half an hour just to finish a single level because there's zero tolerant for mistake.

For all levels I have played so far, there's no doubt that every level is well made by the designer. They know how we as the player think so they can create these wonderful and annoying levels to beat, but fun and enjoyable to play.

Friend Bonding

I have been playing Overcooked! 2 since it was originally released in 2018 and we just played the DLC and commit to doing four stars all the level since we haven't done it in the past. The experience never fades, we still screaming to each other, many overcooked foods were thrown, and a lot of restart button pressed.

Even for all the mistakes we had in the game with all the screaming and yelling at each other, we still having fun completing every level in the game and there's no hate between us.

This game could also be played in an office with some co-worker(s). With Overcooked! 2 now available in Nintendo Switch, an office worker who has Nintendo Switch can spend their time after work, playing Overcooked! 2 to release their stress to the game with some laughter.

At the end of the day, the game is incredibly fun for me, and maybe you will enjoy it as much as I did. I think two players is a great number for players, but it could be better if there're four players in the lobby so the chaos can even bigger. The game is about having fun with your friend(s) so don't get too competitive and get mad with your friend over an overcooked sausage.

For those who don't have a friend that can play Overcooked! 2 with, you can play in a single-player mode with you controlling two characters. You can switch bodied between two characters and also the difficulty will scale down for single-player mode. The downside with the single-player mode, you will easily get bored as time goes by, so I suggest inviting a friend(s) to play alongside you to make it more spicy.

So far I like how the game evolving and the available DLC. Overcooked! 2 is an amazing co-op experience with some laughter and screaming at the same time. It can bring the Master Chef vibe into real life that you can experience. There's no doubt, Overcooked! 2 is the best co-op game I've ever played until now. So that's it, what are you waiting for? Buy the game, call your friend(s), grab a controller and play the game together.