Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the kitchen: Overcooked 2.
Offering more of the same delicious, diabolical co-operative cooking that made 2016's Overcooked so amazing, the sequel adds new kitchens, new dishes, new chefs and a whole lot of new reasons to do that thing where you scream in frustration and laughter at the same time. With even more friendship-testing challenges and hilarious culinary cock-ups, this is a welcome second course, even if it doesn't stray very far from the original game's recipe.
In the main story mode of Overcooked 2, the world has come under attack from zombie bread and for some reason that means you and two or three friends need to travel the world learning and perfecting all sorts of dishes in some of the least OH&S compliant restaurants you can imagine. Just go with it.
Welp, that pasta’s gone forever.
You each pick a chef (from cats and crocodiles to the returning and still superior wheelchair-bound raccoon) and then try to keep your cool as the orders roll in. From the adorable art and interactive map screen to the goofy storytelling featuring the Onion King and his faithful dog Kevin, the presentation will be very familiar to veterans of the first game. You will notice, however, an overall improvement in polish and performance.
For the uninitiated, Overcooked sees your team of chefs working in a themed kitchen with a small menu, putting various dishes together as specified by the tickets that appear at the top of the screen. The genius of the game's design is it all seem so totally doable.
A sushi roll for example needs a nori (grab it from a container), some rice (boil it in a pot) and then either cucumber or fish (slice it up first). Putting it together, serving it to the pass and washing the plates afterwards should be child's play, especially with multiple chefs, and you certainly shouldn't crash into each other, set anything on fire or accidentally pick up a pot seven times when you're trying to pick up a plate.
And yet, every kitchen here is designed to turn simple tasks like this into puzzles that will test your skills of organisation and co-operation, and when those skills fail you will absolutely set off a chain reaction of stupid mistakes.
Curse these magical, disappearing staircases!
Maybe the set-up is split between two hot air balloons, with burners on one and ingredient stores on the other, which will certainly end with food on fire (or plummeting to Earth) if you don't come at it with a plan. One sorcery-themed kitchen has chefs using magic portals to get around between the burners, ingredients and the pass, but this makes changing positions way too slow. Should we put one chef on meat patties and have one do the buns and salads, then have them meet in the middle to make and serve the burgers? Or should one chef just constantly ferry ingredients to the centre and dump them on the floor for others to use? (You don't lose points for food safety violations, thankfully.)
There are some kitchens that even change entirely halfway through, with one early example asking you to make pasta on a hot air balloon, before an electrical storm sends you crashing into a sushi restaurant where you need to seamlessly transition to making cucumber rolls.
The variety of both the stages and the dishes is significantly bigger here than in the original, with foods like cakes and pizzas requiring completely different processes to pasta or salads. But really, this is all so the game's sadistic level designers can think up more ways to mess with you by putting the pizza oven in an incredibly inconvenient place, or forcing you to cut enough mushrooms for four dishes ahead of time while you wait for access to a frying pan.
Spinning benches like this mean you don’t only have to plan where you’ll go to prepare the food, but think about where you might get stuck.
Chefs also now have the ability to throw raw ingredients to each other, which seems like it should make everything easier, but again it just ends up being fodder for even more stressful situations. A well aimed-throw from across the room onto exactly the right bench can be cause for celebration, but more often it will fall into a lake, or by a massive pile of onions nobody asked for or needs.
Early on in the game it's fairly trivial to nail enough correct orders to get the full three stars, but soon enough you'll settle into a regular rhythm of trying, failing, working out a plan of attack with your fellow chefs, and trying again. This all tends to create a lot of tension mid-challenge — as players blame each other for raw steaks that somehow end up travelling along conveyer belts and straight into the bin ("you flicked the switch at the wrong time!") — but also, eventually, the kind of jovial camaraderie when you finally nail it that not many games can match.
Beyond the story mode (where you need to keep earning enough stars to open up new levels), there's an arcade mode where you can jump into any stage you want to chase high scores, and a versus mode for competitive play. The latter adds some interesting new mechanics to let you distract and mess with each other, but it's not as interesting as working together against the machinations of the game itself. Overcooked 2 also supports online play, but you'll need to make sure you have a reliable way to communicate with your fellow chefs.
If you're really into masochism you can also play the game's levels solo, pressing a button to switch control between two different chefs. But this feels more like a pointlessly challenging hack, like playing Dark Souls with the Donkey Konga bongos, than it does a viable single-player mode. Two or three chefs is the sweet spot.
Overall this feels more like an ultimate version of Overcooked than it does a true sequel. With the fundamentals already set in the first game, the developers here clearly took a lot of pleasure in really maximising the number of ways they could surprise, delight and stress the hell out of my wheelchair racoon and his animal friends. Not that I'm complaining, because this is the kind of couch multiplayer treat I'd happily chow down on again and again.
Overcooked 2 is out now for Switch (reviewed), PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
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