Review | Let’s Cook Together

LifeisXbox’s Let’s Cook Together review | You’ll need two chefs to play Let’s Cook Together so feel free to click away if you don’t have a friend to play this. Or stay if you want to read how awesome this game plays! I was lucky enough that my girlfriend wanted to join my burger, pasta, and ice cream-making adventure, by now we started a lot of co-op games but barely finished any of them for multiple reasons. Difficulty, motivation, or simply time constraints but every simply matched with Let’s Cook Together. The challenge is perfect for veteran and casual gamers, cooking rounds don’t take long and it remains fun for hours and hours. As a result, I can call this experience one of the best co-op games on Xbox! A light version of a very similar game called Overcooked but thanks to simplistic gameplay mechanics it is more open for everyone, old and young!

We played Let’s Cook Together for six hours on Xbox Series X, also available on Nintendo Switch, PS4 and pc.

What we liked!

• You do the fries, fuck wait.. we need ketchup, throw me tomatoes! | There is quite a bit involved in making a simple hamburger. You have to fry the meat correctly, toss in a tomato and some lettuce, and for most people preferably some cheese and of course bacon. No hamburger is complete without bacon, right? (Sorry, vegetarians) All of this is perfectly translated into gameplay, you have to cut the lettuce and tomatoes, bake the meat and place everything in the right order on the burger. Regularly you or the other player can only do a specific task so you’ll need clear communication for delivering everything in a timely fashion. Everything from cutting, mixing or placing meat on the fire is done with one button, the X-button. You can also throw ingredients to the second player (Y-button) or serve the dish with a single button press. Of course, it’s not just cheeseburgers and bacon burgers. There are also fries, drinks, sauces, or completely different dishes such as pasta, pancakes with syrup, different types of ice cream and so much more. All that combined makes the game difficult because you have to remember the preparation method. Each incoming order of dishes also has a time limit, which brings some pressure. (Bit like in real restaurant life)
• Truly a lot of content | Let’s Cook together works with three seasons and each season has 168 stars to earn, unlocks an endless mode, and features a battle mode so players can fight each other for the most points. You have a McDonalds-like season, a dessert season, and world cuisine. That last one was pretty challenging with all its preparation methods. In total, more than 150 stages await the player, all of them with different layouts. Sometimes only one player can cut something or bake. It keeps the game fresh and challenging, but never unconquerable.
• Upgrading kitchen and unlocking character skins | Depending on how well you do you can upgrade appliances or cooking skills. As a result, you can bake more meat at the same time or cut tomatoes faster. Deciding what to improve is a team’s discussion and will depend a bit on playing style, we always went for improving baking times, for example, the waffle toaster as you’ll lose a lot of time waiting for things if you don’t. You’ll also unlock character skins, basically humanoid vegetables that look cute.
• Charming visuals | It may be a bit basic but it has charm and players will fall in love with the cute playable veggies. There’s just something hilariously lovely about a banana with blue eyes that runs around making burgers or fish & chips. What was important with Let’s Cook Together was that everything was immediately in view so players don’t have frustrations looking for ingredients, I don’t think they could have done a better job so thumbs up for the dev Yellow Dot.
• Good for many laughs | I’m writing down one example but Let’s Cook Together has many moments like this, where chaos takes over and players end up making mistakes. Anyway, I was baking meat while filling a cup of Cola and got distracted so the meat got burned. In a pure panic as other things went wrong too, I simply throw the burned meat to my girlfriend and said in Dutch ‘doe der wa mee’ (do something with it) Clearly you don’t serve burned meat so a lot went wrong in that situation. It is one of those games, doesn’t matter who you are playing it with, will allow for laughs and plain fun.

Somewhere between

• Selecting the right order | You begin with one order but after a few levels you will have to complete multiple orders at the same time. Here mistakes regularly happen, this is a players mistake but it ain’t really that easy to select an order. Taking into consideration how easy the controls are I felt that selecting an order was a bit out-of-place, especially when playing with kids or people who don’t play many games. It is a bit frustrating to throw a finished cup of soda and seeing it go to a wrong order, meaning you miss turning in an order because the time limit passed. So if this happens just blame the game and not the other player, keep that friendly atmosphere!

What we disliked

• Only local co-op | It has ‘together’ in the game title so it is obvious that this is meant for cooperative play. I respect that developer Yellow Dot stuck with this concept and dropped single-player content. However, nowadays I feel that launching this kind of game without online play support is a bit weird and unfortunate. And yeah, I know the costs and additional work for that but it would be so beneficial to play this with an online friend. It would make the game more accessible for everyone too, now you limit yourself to players who have someone else to play this with. 

How long to beat the story | 15 hours (all three seasons)
How long to achieve 1000G | Around 20 hours
Similar with | Overcooked

CONCLUSION

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