Cook, Serve, Delicious is one of these franchises that I really enjoy and would love to devour entirely if I had infinite time. I love the fast cooking action that you can learn to master, the rush of the orders, the mashing of the keys and the perfect gold medal that you get at the end. It’s not without its lot of frustrations, for sure, and there were some parts of 2 that I preferred over 3, but for the things it tries and the new ideas it brings to the table, CSR3 is a pretty good game!
Set after the events of the second game, you are now cooking inside a food truck instead of restaurants. You have orders visible in advance for the next stop - so you can prep things in advance - and you get a few special orders along the way. When you get to a stop, things kick into high gear and you need to finish prepping the food that requires more work and serve everything. Sometimes that means adding ketchup on a corndog or assembling one of the ten different chicken sandwiches you can make with the ingredients you have. I like the new button they’ve added to automatically serve everything that can be served without needing to hit all keys.
Cooking is done the same way as before, using keyboard inputs each step of the way. Some of them for very simple recipes can get ingrained in your memory (MEDOVIKS, RISHN, KSU, etc.) but others change all the time because clients want no pickles, a fruit salad with mango instead of melon, so you always have to be on your toes. Hitting the wrong key - serving a meal still being cooked, serving a corndog with only ketchup while mustard was also required, adding a cup of the wrong sauce with a meal - still feels terrible because really, do I HAVE to serve that - prevents you from getting a golden medal, so I restart immediately when anything bad happens.
At the end of a level, you get some money based on the difficulty levels of the meals you’ve decided to carry in your truck and that money is converted into another kind of money and levels that you can use to purchase upgrades… I feel that this whole system is a bit superfluous. Getting experience towards upgrade points is fine, but money never felt like anything, so maybe there could’ve been a way to simplify all that. You use money to buy new recipes, but I also didn’t feel like buying them made much sense. It’s not like the ones you could buy were ‘better’ than the ones you had, so why make them purchasable? The upgrades are pretty fun, some give you more holding stations or more slots for customers, others give you passive time bonuses before orders go bad, so you can customize your experience a bit.
The level list can be a bit confusing, you go through all roads in a specific part of the country, but you need a number of medals to participate in specific levels, you sometimes cannot go from A to B to C, because level B-2 requires 5 medals while C-1 only requires 3, so you have to go beat C-1 and C-2 before coming back to B-2, I really wonder why that was done, because it’s just a little annoyance without a clear purpose. As someone who beat a great part of CSD 2’s Shift Mode, the level composition also baffled me a bit. Point requirements are easy to understand, but the specific types of foods you can select from in each of them sometimes didn’t make much sense to me. You also get attacked by foodtrucks as you drive along, and that’s a neat idea.
Overall, the core gameplay is still as exciting and fun and the game still feels great, so my feelings on CSD3 are nothing but positive. Some of the fluff around the actual act of cooking wasn’t my favorite in the franchise, but that’s fine. It’s a game I recommend to try! Music’s pretty good too.
