Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together Review – Stressful Food Planning

Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together is a cooking simulation game developed and published by Big Cheese Studio. Start your own restaurant and prepare the dishes to satisfy your customers. You’re a one-person band (unless playing with friends), taking care of everything from ordering ingredients to serving your final creations. Grow your restaurant at your own pace or throw yourself into the deep end with the busiest restaurant you can create.

There is no big premise or narrative behind your restaurant ownership. You have the funds and location along with a well-stocked restaurant. What the restaurant offers and specializes in is up to you, though you don’t have many choices at the start. As you gain more experience and complete objectives, you increase the variety of dishes you can create. This lets you customize your restaurant further and you can purchase decorations to design the venue as you like.

Managing a restaurant is no easy task, especially without other players as I did. You decide what dishes go on the menu based on your experience and food supplies. If you run out, you must order more or disappoint customers when you can’t meet their requests. You also can’t prepare for every dish under the sun as you don’t have the funds. Food eventually expires and you must find the right balance to avoid wasting money while restocking.

This simulates the difficulty of actually managing your own food establishment without hand-holding. While there’s no consideration for rent and utilities, managing food stocks that expire isn’t easy. Finding the right balance between ordering enough for a busy day and wasting money takes experience. It’s a challenge that immerses you in the game and shows some of the challenges of the food industry.

This also applies when preparing for the upcoming service. While you can get away with cooking dishes from scratch at the beginning, this inevitably leads to disaster once you grow. Preparing ingredients beforehand or even using extra servings from the previous day help you manage a growing customer base. There’s never a perfect system but you find something that works for you. This helps you empathize with the work any food establishment does to serve its customers.

It’s not a perfect simulation as normally the chef doesn’t take orders at a dining establishment. You also don’t deal with additional costs like paying other employees even during a multiplayer game. There are also practices you can get away with that would never fly in a serious establishment such as leaving a gas-powered fire on for hours. Some breaks from reality are necessary, but some liberties push the boundaries of what is acceptable.

Preparing new dishes can be difficult at first but it’s easy to bring up the recipe if you are unsure of anything. It’s clear what tools are required and what ingredients are necessary. However, the recipe only uses images to explain steps rather than adding written text. This doesn’t seem like a problem at first until you aren’t sure what some images mean. Veterans may be able to figure out the context but a beginner would struggle with more advanced recipes.

Coupled with the fact that the kitchen is built to be large for multiplayer, it feels like singleplayer games are disadvantaged. Many activities are tricky to manage for individual players and it feels like you need lots of experience to progress further. If you don’t have a group of friends or a reliable lobby to play, you may not experience the game’s full potential. Even if you develop your career on your own, it’s not easy without people helping you.

Having control over your restaurant’s growth can help you advance at your own pace while getting comfortable with gameplay. Deciding the menu, ordering ingredients, and practicing new dishes increases immersion in the ownership experience. But several concepts aren’t explained properly even during the tutorial. Gameplay is also heavily designed around multiplayer, making the singleplayer experience tough. Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together is a good simulation experience, but it’s designed for multiple people who know what they’re doing.

Victor reviewed Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.