Order Up!
Score: 82% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Zoo Games Developer: SuperVillain Studios Media: CD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Simulation/ Family/ Edutainment
Graphics & Sound: Has a cooking game succeeded when it makes you hungry while playing? If the test is to produce food that you hope tastes as good as it looks, Order Up passes. We're all lucky that violent games don't make us want to go out and copy what we see, but Order Up! definitely made us want to go into the kitchen and have our way with a ham hock or a catfish. The best part of the game apart from the food is the sense that you are actually working in a kitchen, in a restaurant, in a town. With real citizens, even! The setting of the game is an important part of differentiating Order Up! from others in this category that end up as nice kitchen simulators, but not much more. Some nice touches you'll find are in the visual design, very zany and cartoony right down to the food. The foodstuffs are just realistic enough to keep it feeling real, but they're also stylized enough to keep it fun. The denizens of the town that frequent your restaurant are a strange, funny bunch. They make funny comments, have funny names, and all look like somewhat like variations on a Weeble. You remember, right? They wobble and don't fall down... As nicely realized as the characters were, it didn't feel like there was enough variety. Serving the same folks over and over again has a purpose in the game's design, as you learn more about their preferences, but it got too predictable watching them walk into the door to be served the fourth or fifth time.
Gameplay: Order Up! literally starts with an airdrop of your chef-of-choice into town, setting the tone for kooky fun. The training portion of the game is short and sweet as you get a chance to flip a burger in the town's greasy spoon. If you can handle this session, you are clearly ready to start your own shop, right? Opening up a new place means you'll play to your strengths, making a few recipes that you can totally rock out on. The patrons are not afraid to critique your food, and it becomes apparent immediately that they loves them some spice. Order Up! offers several ways to score big points for your cuisine. Serving a great dish starts with great ingredients. Prepare them in a masterly fashion and you'll have a top-scoring dish. Match up your special customers' needs with Chef Spices and you'll score really big. The spices are on offer from a shopkeeper nearby, and you can also see a man about a dish and buy secret recipes on the black market. The money you earn on the job will help you find nifty additions to your menu and you can invest in assistant chefs or kitchen equipment. The sequence of play is pretty typical cooking-game fare. You get an order, usually two at a time, and start putting together the various pieces. This might involve chopping, dicing, or slicing. The food processor and oven that come into play later in the game are some of the most simple implements in your kitchen. Mastering the griddle and the stove top are where you'll find real glory... or miserable defeat. The Wii-mote is all you'll need to play the game, making motions that are relatively intuitive when you consider the action that would be taken in real life. The simplicity of control is refreshing and the motion controls make this pretty absorbing and fun to pick up for gamers of almost any ability. As you cook a dish, you'll see little visual clues about the state of a particular dish. Some will simply get hotter until they burn or you put them on a plate. Others require more handling, whether that involves flipping, turning, or stirring. If all this is a bit overwhelming, you may prefer the Quick Play option that gives you a chance to practice making dishes before facing the pressure of customers. There are other pressures in the kitchen that you'll discover while playing, like infestations of rats and visiting health inspectors. Would you believe the former is easier to deal with than the latter?
Difficulty: The customers are definitely tricky to please, but spice is the answer to 80% of your troubles. Spice a dish right and you stand to make customers very happy and earn big tips. Hints are available about what each customer wants in both the game and the manual. Mastering the spice preparation requires a fair amount of skill, since it breaks your rhythm for general prep of your food. Having the assistant chefs and learning to use them makes things much easier; you can pass to them the things you don't want to do, or have them focus on a side dish so you can get your spices right. Throwing away food is an option if the prep isn't what you want. The ability to throw away specific components of a dish that weren't prepared right and make them again is a nice move. Coordinating service and cooking for customers is hard enough that it doesn't make sense to have people cook the entire dish over again just because some part wasn't executed perfectly. Throwing away too much food may lead to rats and unhappy customers (not necessarily in that order), so you'll want to get your skills down quickly and be able to properly delegate to your assistant chefs.
Game Mechanics: The controls are a bit slippery, very forgiving at some times and insanely strict at others. The Wii-mote handles some motions better than others in this context. The sawing and cutting motions felt clunky, while the rolling motions were buttery. Each time you try a new move, Order Up! gives you some input on how to execute and achieve a strong score. If things don't work out, you can simply drag the whole kit and caboodle to the trash. Getting around the kitchen is easy enough, with the (B) trigger-button as the means for zooming out and the Control Pad used for zooming in and moving left-to-right. A nice touch is the ability to see the status on one dish while you're cooking another. Even pulled way back from the stove, you can see the temperature gauge creeping up on your steak. Assistant chefs appear as icons on the screen and you can drag ingredients to them as you would to your prep table. Some items aren't available for assistant chefs to prepare, but they serve a purpose by complementing your cooking style and the restaurant. Some chefs are good at cooking specific things and a smart player will match each judge or groups of judges to a restaurant. The upgrades to the restaurant are essential for improving your service and earning stars. The star system is a basic gateway to more advanced levels and food. The ultimate culinary test awaits you, but you'll need to break a few eggs to make that omelet. If you've resisted cooking games for any reason, now is the time to latch onto Order Up! and be impressed. The game even comes with a white, paper chef's hat! What could be cooler than that? Progression in the game where you build new restaurants and make better food keeps the shelf life strong. It's a shame that there wasn't any multiplayer option included, to have an Iron Chef-style battle or something similar. Perfection in gaming may not be possible, but Order Up! certainly feels well cooked.
-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock
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