Pizza Slice Review

Pizza Slice, developed by Quest Craft and published by Gaming Factory on the 13th of March, is a cooking simulator you can play with friends, or, well, against. Yep, it’s actually a PvP cooking sim, and co-op is supposedly coming soon. 

The story isn’t very interesting or complicated. You play as Tonio, an Italian man who moved to the US to run his grandfather’s old pizzeria after the latter died. He’s not alone, though; his cousin Alfonso is also there, but being very lazy, he’s not the most useful guy to have around.

While there isn’t a deeper narrative in Pizza Slice, there are some interesting elements, like the Mafia demanding you poison some people or hold some packages for them, but it doesn’t really lead to anything, since the game is mainly a cooking sim.

So, how well is that aspect of the title? Well, it’s complicated. The base gameplay loop is pretty simple: you buy ingredients for different recipes with which you make pizzas to sell to customers. Orders have a time limit, and with the money you earn, you can get better work tools and stations, and buy more ingredients for more complicated recipes, or just to be able to fulfil orders faster.

This simplicity is a bit of a double-edged sword, mostly because even though you’d expect something this basic to be easy and calming, it’s kind of the opposite. It got to the point that I had so many different types of pizza that could be made, I just took some time at the start to make as many as I could stock before opening the pizzeria. Even then, I was always super stressed because the sheer number of customers coming in was getting so unruly, I didn’t even have enough tables!

But, at the same time, it can be really boring. For example, at the end of the day, you have to remember to put all the items that can go bad, like cheese or meat, into the fridge, which is just annoying and doesn’t actually make the game any harder. You don’t have a time limit (or if you do, it’s very long and I didn’t have to deal with it at any point) on when to end the day after closing, so it’s just a monotonous task that doesn’t add any difficulty.

Additionally, the experience is full of bugs, and even the things that work correctly are very unclear about what you should do. Pizza Slice forces you into its tutorial-story very often, so sometimes you’re forced to buy an upgrade you couldn’t care less about before being able to continue anything else. And while buying upgrades is pretty straightforward, it’s really unclear how to do it: for regular ingredients, you just have to left-click on the items you want, and then go pay. For upgrades, though, you have to hold E for a few seconds, and the text is red for some reason, which instinctively made me think I couldn’t purchase it — if you look at the Steam reviews, there’s at least one person who says they weren’t able to get it because of how confusing this is!

As for the bugs, even though they don’t make it unplayable, they are very annoying. On some days, time just doesn’t move until you reopen the game. On some missions, such as poisoning a specific patron, the target doesn’t come, and you have to redo the entire day, hoping this time they will. Often, actions just don’t register, and you have to go find where the messy code of this title decided you put the pizza you just tried to serve a customer. The number of times I’ve had to reopen the game made me seriously not want to play it, and I doubt most people enjoy spending half their time in a game closing and reopening it.

The way Pizza Slice looks fits with the theme of the game and doesn’t look bad, but it’s not anything to write home about. I never found myself thinking “wow, this is beautiful” or anything similar, but I never complained either. Same with the sound — the music and vfx aren’t bad, but again, there isn’t anything special about them, and if I ever played the game again, I’d probably mute it and just put my own playlist on instead.

But will I play it again? Well, probably not, I’ll be honest. Maybe once they fix all the bugs and add some more meat to it, but after you’ve played for a little bit, you basically played it all, it just becomes “do the same thing but quicker”, which is pretty boring. I wouldn’t recommend it, then, even if you’re a huge fan of cooking simulators; there are probably better options, especially at £13, which isn’t particularly cheap.