Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together is the sequel to Cooking Simulator from Big Cheese Studios, described on their Steam page as “Cooking Simulator is back: bigger, better, and with multiplayer! Create your own recipes and take advantage of new and improved controls to become the best restaurant cook in the city”! Let’s see if we can cook up a storm for our restaurant and keep the patrons coming in.

Loading in, you have a nice, clean character creation screen, body, eyes, hair, tattoos and different clothing, so you can add your own personal touch to your character, which becomes more important in this title as you have the ability to play multiplayer. You have two game modes to choose from: running your restaurant, which has quests and scenario-based gameplay and includes more restaurant management elements or a sandbox mode where everything is unlocked, and you have a full kitchen of ingredients and equipment ready to go.

Starting off with the scenario mode, I am greeted by “Spatty”, the spatula, who is there to help guide me through the tutorial and cook my first meals.

After cooking my restaurant’s famous fries for my first customer, I thought I was invincible. Then it was time to cook the pork ribs for my next customer, and I was a little scared. The game is very in-depth, covering temperatures, times, and seasonings. Every interaction you have with your dish affects its taste and freshness; don’t use old ingredients either.

To cook the fries, I had to slice the potatoes (there are three different ways to slice potatoes depending on the use), fry them at the right temperature, remove them from the oven, and season them with only 1 gram of salt. Turn on the deep fryer to preheat, then deep-fry them. Remove them at the right time, then head over to the plating station.

Choose the correct-size plate, and plate them with mayonnaise sauce for seasoning and decoration. The plating or finishing station is where it all comes together. You have your finishing sauces and side dishes here, so you can plate up to suit your style.

All up, I counted 125 dishes you can cook, each with its own ingredients and preparation, and that doesn’t include the dishes you can create with your own little flair.

When selecting a meal to cook, you can find the recipe at the bottom left of the screen. You can scroll up and down to see what needs to be seasoned, cooked, and timed, so you are never alone and always have clear direction on what and when everything needs to be done. It can be overwhelming at the start, but if you follow the instructions, you will get there in the end.​

Every day, you have to create your menu for the restaurant you are going to run, and then order the ingredients you need to cook everything on it. If you order the night before, no issues, the goods will arrive on time. If you run out of something mid-service and need ingredients to complete a dish, there is an express delivery service for the same day, but at a higher cost, cutting into your profit margins and potentially preventing you from a larger order the next day.

When you receive your delivery, you sort it out in the back room into cold goods and shelved goods, as the extra time taken to organise here will help you down the track as you begin cooking. The most important part of this game is prep! Cut, store, and position everything you need so that when customers come in, you have everything ready and in place. When deciding your menu, you need to cater for your clientele.

For example, if construction workers visit the restaurant more often, they prefer fatty, salty food; hence, you need to ensure your menu covers a wide range of tastes. Each dish you make or create is divided into seven categories: Salty, Hot, Bitter, Sour, Umami, Fatty, and Sweet. This scale is dictated by what seasoning, type of meat and sauces you use.

You get a score for each meal from your customers, showing the profit made, the tip from the customer, the experience gained from making the meal, and how renowned you are. Being renowned is your status earned by making quality meals in the restaurant; it’s essentially your reputation. This is where you find a nice little levelling system to ensure you aren’t just sitting there pumping out meals.

Under a skill tree of management and cooking, you have 14 skills you can unlock. This can be from being able to carry two plates on the management side to being able to hold more utensils on your chef’s belt for quick access on the cooking side. There are also nineteen different perks to unlock. A reduction in delivery costs, a 15% larger error margin when pouring liquids, or receiving 25% of the value of goods in the bin are a few examples.

The graphics are on point, not much to complain about here. The ingredients look great, the oils when frying or even the heat in the oven, there is some great detail. You only see inside your kitchen, stock room, and restaurant; they are all well-decorated with clocks and times. There is nothing to fault here. Once you upgrade your restaurant’s interior and colour palette, you really feel like you have made it as a business owner and a chef, as it becomes much classier.

The music in the menus is a bit in-your-face when you first load in, I assume, to try and build the excitement. The sounds in the game are nice and clean; you have the background noise of the exhaust fans, like a real kitchen. You can hear your ovens on and timers, each interaction with a utensil, putting it down on a bench, cutting and many more are all there.

​Overall, Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together is a masterfully crafted cooking simulation game. I must stress this is a very in-depth simulation, not a casual cooking game. You will have to expertly season all your food correctly, prepare all your ingredients, have a station ready to go, and order correctly for the day before you even think about managing the business side of the restaurant. There are hours of fun in the game if this is what you are into.

I haven’t even started creating my own recipes, which is another great feature of this title. The game really comes alive in multiplayer, where you can have a laugh with your friends and try to feel the stress a real kitchen would come under during service. If you love simulators, this is the one for you, with hours of entertainment, and it’s definitely a standout in the current cooking simulator genre.

Written by: Mike Bridge