I have another management game on the docket, and it's another selling game. This time, it's a mix of RPG and cooking! For better or worse, though, the marriage of these two ideas was pretty standard.
Overview
In Cooking Quest, you play as an amnesiac shopkeeper providing food to villagers and getting heroes to procure ingredients for you. You manage what to sell, what to cook, and what ingredients to look for. Along the way, you learn new dishes, deck out your food truck and shopkeeper, and manage your cooks.
Story and Writing
The world has been ravaged by a demon king and, thinking humans gain their strength from dishes, eliminated humanity's ability to cook. The lore of the game has a bit of a comedic tone and follows the nameless entrepreneur as his business grows. The writing in this game contains some standard-level jokes that add more to the game's charm rather than detracting from it. It is also evident that it was written by a non-native English speaker as there are some interestingly worded phrases here an there.
Unfortunately, the lore of the game stops at the background. The heroes you hire don't have any stories behind them, and the villagers you meet don't even talk to you. The only characters that have any sort of exposition are the tavern keeper, your cooks, and the food truck owner, and even then they only have the dialogue to go off of. There is some flavour text for the ingredients, but it doesn't do much in terms of lore building.
Aesthetics
The game's visuals are pixel art reminiscent of the original Final Fantasy games on the Super Nintendo. The menu looks organized and intuitive, and icons are actually not pixel art. They are soft-edged images to represent what they are supposed to be for. Backgrounds are incredibly detailed; the scrolling backdrop in the dungeons combined with the simplistic movements of the pixel characters make it interesting enough to watch for a short time. The main screen overlooking the food cart has a lot going on as well, with enough to keep the player's attention on what's on the screen.
Gameplay and Mechanics
Much like Shop Titans, most of the gameplay revolves on your storefront. In the main menu, you can expand your cart to have more cooks working at the same time, which will change the appearance of your cart. In later levels you are able to travel to other towns, but primarily the idea in this menu is for you to tell your cooks what to make and decide what you want to put up for sale. Once you make enough of a certain dish, you can enhance the quality of it through the same menus.
The cooks get orders directly from you by tapping on them and accessing their individual menus. You can also enhance their cooking time and maximum quantity, as well as equip them with beneficial accessories through this same menu. The cooks can be pushed to go faster by tapping on them after they start cooking. Once they complete their food, the dishes go straight to your inventory and they stand idle while patrons pick out what they want.
These patrons are actually your villagers for the most part. You meet these villagers by going to different villages or by buying land and constructing various buildings in the 'Town' menu. In this menu, you are able to collect rent in the form of gold coins at houses, get gems in the quarry, send heroes on bounty hunts, and gather ingredients from the farm, to name a few. More importantly, you can also hire heroes at the tavern in your town. This is where the RPG aspect comes in.
There are multiple tiers of hero hiring: standard contracts, premium contracts, free contracts, and gem contracts. Standard contracts and free contracts yield one to three star heroes, while premium contracts and gem contracts get you three to five star heroes. Obviously the higher the star, the stronger and rarer the hero. You get better results in the dungeon and bounty hunting modes of the game with higher-star heroes. These two modes are your primary methods of obtaining cooking ingredients. The higher the level of an area in the dungeon your heroes get, the more likely they'll run into a monster that will drop rarer ingredients. These rarer ingredients automatically unlock new dishes for your cooks, and the cycle continues.
This whole gameplay system is great for a while, but it does lose its shine quicker than other management games. This is is because the progression is a bit slow, and the rewards are honestly not all too great. There is an achievement system for this game rewards you with some gems for use on getting costumes and quality-of-experience features, but this isn't the big detractor. The biggest detractor is the rate of which ingredients are obtained over how fast they get used, making the acquisition of the ingredients the bottleneck in the game's flow.
There have been a few times where I had wanted to complete some specific orders, but was unable to due to a lack of ingredients. This wouldn't be so bad, but the nature of getting ingredients is essentially waiting for your heroes to fill their bags. If there was an active element in the game it would be more of a reward. The dishes with rarer ingredients are naturally more expensive, but the difference in price between the common dishes and the rare ones are large enough to make the production of common dishes discouraging. This in turn incentivises the player to wait out for rarer materials.
Technical problems
The game seems to be a fairly lightweight game, but for some reason takes enough memory to hang on start up. I should note that the phone that I use to play games is not the most cutting-edge in technology, but one would assume that a pixel art game wouldn't be so resource heavy.
Final Thoughts
Cooking Quest - Food Wagon Adventure scores a 3.5 out of 5 overall.
The game has its appeal and its own charm, but it does fall flat on its experience. The appeal to management games is the achievement of certain goals, but doing so in this game feels inconsequential and repetitive. The nature of the ingredient acquisition is slow and unrewarding thanks to its lack of anything to do, and the rewards from buying upgrades feel hollow. The nicely-made backgrounds and charming characterizations were not enough to make up for its lack of effort coaxed from the player.
That being said, if you're looking for an idle game that you can check up on once every hour or so, this could be for you. As there is not much in the way of investment in terms of mechanical skill or technique, you can leave this running alone for some time.
That's it for Cooking Quest - Food Wagon Adventure. Thanks for reading!
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