Kitchen Wars Review

Released on Steam Early Access on the 16th of April and then fully on the 4th of August, Kitchen Wars is a team-based co-op game in which you play with up to seven other players. As a fan of chaotic cooking games, I was intrigued by the idea of other humans being the obstacle, instead of level design. 

There isn’t really any story to Kitchen Wars, as it’s a party game with the focus being fun, chaotic gameplay with friends. Although such party cooking games with a narrative (and a pretty good one!) do exist, such as Overcooked, it’s really just a bonus one can add if they want and not a main feature of any good game of the type, so the lack of one isn’t really a problem, unless you’re looking for a title with a good story, in which case this might not be the genre for you.

The gameplay actually doesn’t really have any cooking — it’s mostly about giving your customers food, cleaning up the restaurant, and sabotaging the other team. Whilst I don’t necessarily mind the lack of food preparation, usually the most fun part of these games is trying to figure out how to make a recipe, and Kitchen Wars does actually feel lacking in its learning curve when it comes to gameplay and understanding why you should make the decisions you do. Additionally, the parts that do exist just aren’t fun: serving customers their food is just walking back and forth, without any real challenge, as long as the enemy team doesn’t bother you. Sabotaging the enemy team is also not particularly interesting: it just varies between throwing things at them, body-blocking them, and messing up the things in their restaurant.

It’s honestly pretty boring after just a round or two, and I didn’t really find myself challenged at any point… except for one — the game absolutely cannot be played with an odd number of players. If you are a single person up against two people, you will lose every time, regardless of your skill level. It’s just impossible to win when someone can focus solely on making it impossible for you to work well, and the other just infinitely grinds points until the time is up. I wouldn’t even say it’s a balancing issue that can be fixed; it’s a problem with the core game design being too simple to actually include any kind of strategy beyond the simple “get score and stop the other player from getting score”.

As an isometric 3D game, Kitchen Wars doesn’t look very bad, but it’s definitely not good either. The player characters and NPCs all look fine enough within the art style, but I’m just not a fan of how blocky everything is. There aren’t a whole lot of other visuals to see beyond the restaurant itself and the tables/chairs in it. Overall, the graphics aren’t anything to write home about, but they wouldn’t make you want to turn away from the screen.

As for sound design, there isn’t much in that department either, although nothing to complain about either. All the sound effects are fine and fitting, and the music is never a bother. Though after a few rounds, there is no real reason not to mute the game and open up your Spotify playlist instead. As there’s no dialogue in the game, there’s also no voice acting at all, so while the sound department doesn’t have much going for it, it’s not missing anything either.

Overall, then, Kitchen Wars isn’t a particularly good game. Its only real focus is the gameplay, where it’s severely lacking in terms of content, complexity, and just basic fun. Although it’s not an expensive title at all, costing only £3.99, I still can’t really recommend it to anyone, unless you really like chaos cookers and ran out of the better ones.