I don’t generally do the question-as-title thing, because I’d rather be straightforward with my opinions. If I think Cook Serve Delicious 3 is good, my title will be Cook Serve Deliciosu 3 Is Good, if it’s bad, the title will be Cook Serve Delicious 3 Is Bad. I make this title a question because I’m not sure. I liked Cook Serve Delicious 3, but I had a lot of trouble with it the first time I played.
That was before I was trying to actually finish games, and by the time I’d circled back around to it, a different bundle had gotten me the entire series, not just the third installment, and I wanted to play it from the beginning not just because I like seeing a series evolve over multiple installments, but also because I was hoping that CSD3 might be more playable if I already knew some of the recipes from the first two games. I was mostly correct: Significant gameplay overhauls between CSD1 and CSD2 means that a lot of the recipes from the first game were altered, so it turns out I could’ve skipped that one (it was still fun, though, so whatever), but CSD2 has pretty similar mechanics to CSD3, similar enough that the recipes are the same, so my cooking skills from CSD2 translated to CSD3 without issue.
And from the starting point of already having the muscle memory for a lot of these recipes, getting into CSD3 was easy. I think it improves on CSD2’s mechanics by replacing side dishes with holding station food. While side dishes extend a customer’s patience for how long it takes you to prepare a main dish, holding station food is prepared in batches. Some customers order a holding station food, others get a special order. Each special order has to be created individually, but a batch of 10 (or however many) holding station orders can serve 10 customers. Whereas in CSD2, harder menus were ones with very few or no side dishes so you couldn’t extend the timer on your main orders, in CSD3, harder menus have lots of both holding station orders and special orders. I like this better, it’s more satisfying to nail a menu with more foods. The addition of cut scenes with Whisk and Cleaver, your robot helpers, make it more compelling to get through the game. Everything is at least a little bit better in CSD3.
But is CSD3 a better game, or is it an expansion pack masquerading as a sequel? Is the audience for CSD3 people who want a good CSD3 game, or is it people who beat CSD2 and want more? I found CSD3 hard to get into before I’d played CSD2. That was before I was trying very hard to finish games at all, so maybe it was just a problem of mindset, but I seriously doubt I found CSD2’s initial learning curve to be to its detriment. I wrote at the time about how it would’ve been better off if it’d had CSD1’s unlocking recipes, where you unlock recipes for a specific type of food (for example, different combinations of toppings on a hamburger) one or two at a time instead of all at once, allowing you to learn the recipes piecemeal. I did, eventually, after two full games, start memorizing several of the CSD2/3 recipes, but it came much more naturally in CSD1.
So on the one hand, Cook Serve Delicious 3 was a lot of fun for me, because I experienced its worst feature back in CSD2, and because that worst feature was a learning curve, that means it didn’t exist for me in CSD3. But I don’t know if I would recommend CSD3 to a friend, because it has that mountain to climb at the beginning, and it’s not actually any fun to climb that mountain. Intentionally failing to make a good difficulty curve does not mean your game has more depth. It means you’re bad at game design.
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