Siege Spots – Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! (PS4)

Posted on Dec 20 2018

Siege Spots - Cook Serve Delicious 2

Have you ever dreamed of running your own restaurant? Have you ever dreamed of being the only employee at your own restaurant, forced to juggle tasks and keep up with customer demand throughout the whole day while keeping the high standards your patrons have come to expect? Cooking the cheeseburgers, taking the trash out, doing the dishes?

No? You think that sounds stressful? Well, it is, and its extremely fun. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is a simulation game where you take on the day to day operations of your own restaurant. You’re given a selection of dishes (or you set up your own menu), and you start your day, fulfilling orders as they pour in and taking each patron’s special requests into account. The result is a frantic game of pattern recognition, muscle memory, and quick reaction times. Like I said, it’s as stressful as it sounds, but as you go through the orders, taking it one step at a time, you’ll enter a state of flow where you’re really keeping on top of everything. It feels almost peaceful.

Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! Screenshot 1

The basic gameplay of CSD!2!! is: wait for orders to pop up in your queue on the left side of the screen, and fulfill them. Each order will have its own special requests: hold the onions, just mustard on my corn dog, things like that. Sometimes, you’ll have to give something time to cook before you finish preparing it. So you’ll put a hot dog on the grill, and then move on to another menu item while the hot dog cooks. That’s where the unique challenge of the CSD! formula comes in. It’s not a simple priority queue for you to file through in single file. You’ll need to jump around to be successful. Chores like doing the dishes or taking out the trash will pop into your queue as well, and they tend to expire quicker than orders, so you’ll sometimes have to break out of your logical order to jump on these tasks. The whole process is simply satisfying. The gameplay isn’t necessarily deep, but it is complex, leading to you never getting so comfortable that the game can’t surprise you, but never feeling out of your depth.

Notably, CSD!2!! adds the concept of pre-preparing some of your foods. For example, the aforementioned hot dogs. You can cook them one at a time as the orders come in, or you can cook 8 at once and keep them under a heat lamp. This adds an extra bit of self-relief that I really enjoy. If you manage to take the leap and step out of your flow to set up these food items, it can save you a lot of trouble when lunch or dinner roll around, when the customers are pouring into your restaurant all at once. It’s kind of like a power up that you earn by taking the risk, and it can mean the difference between a silver or gold medal on any particular restaurant challenge.

None of this will be news to you if you played the initial release of CSD!2!! when it released on PC in late 2017. You might be wondering if there’s anything new in this package for players like you. As far as I can tell, there isn’t anything really. Not that that’s a bad thing, because CSD!2!! is a massive package with tons of challenges to complete and food items to prepare. What you will find, however, is that controlling the game on PS4 is nowhere near as simple as it is on PC. You always had the option to play with a controller, but the keyboard is definitely the preferred way to play. Often, the names of food items would correspond closely to the key you’d press on the keyboard to choose those items. However, the PS4 version understandably has to adapt these controls to fit entirely on the controller. This results in some cumbersome controls, as you hold down the triggers and press buttons on the controller, your eyes darting between the order and your menu of items. Unlike the PC release, I never really felt like I had a handle on any particular dish. However, this was in my short time with the game. CSD!2!! is the kind of game I expect to play for hours, and I expect that the controls might start to feel better over time. They don’t compare to the pick-up-and-play nature of the PC version.

Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! Screenshot 2

So, should you buy CSD!2!! on PS4? If it’s the only option you have to play the game, then yes, absolutely. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is a game that I highly recommend to anyone, because the way the frenetic gameplay makes me feel is incomparable to any other game I’ve played. The difficulty curve is tuned just right, to the point that you’ll always feel challenged and never overwhelmed, which I find is so rare in most games. However, if you have the option, I’d recommend playing on PC instead for the more intuitive controls. Either way though, you should consider picking this game up. Get cooking!

You can buy Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! on the Playstation Store for PS4; or on Steam for Mac, PC, or Linux!

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