Cook For Love Review (Switch & PC)

I won’t beat around the bush here, but the truth is, I am about as useful in the kitchen as a paper napkin is in a professional hockey game. Unlike, say, a lot of fledgling culinary wizards, I don’t necessarily Cook For Love, but rather, for convenience sake; I’d soon rather put an air fryer through the ringer than learn to take full advantage of satsuma peel, if you catch my drift. And, to be fair, I think that’s sort of what drew me to RedDeer.Games’ latest cooking sim: the fact that it didn’t require a great deal of effort to create delicious dishes, but rather, a four-year-old’s ability to tap a few buttons and essentially witness the sparks unfold right there on the plate. I didn’t need a Master’s Degree in culinary arts to be able to do that. Go figure.

Cook For Love could be seen as a few things, but the thing that it is, really, is an entry-level simulator in which players—beginners, if you will—are invited to create relatively complex dishes by mixing, chopping, and stirring a selection of everyday ingredients found in your bog-standard kitchen cupboard. The goal? Why, to establish yourself as an award-winning chef who has the potential of becoming a residential cook aboard the Orient Express, of course. And while I’d like to say that this is much easier said than done — it isn’t; a bit of toast goes a long way in France, funnily enough.

Alas, Cook For Love has just launched on Switch and PC. Care to hear more about it? Then let’s go ahead the prepare the chopping board.

Let’s Cook

If you’ve ever so much as glazed the outer shell of an egg with a good old-fashioned wooden spoon, then you’re probably going to have just about every skill needed to tackle most, if not all of the recipes in Cook For Love. I say that, because, when it all boils down to the cooking process, it’s about as simple as tapping a few buttons, and following a step-by-step pattern to create whatever recipe idles in front of you. And that, fittingly, brings me to the first order of business: the recipes, or simply, the lack of complexity of the recipes themselves. In a typical scenario, you won’t find a multi-step recipe that’s complete with a whole bunch of extracurricular tasks, but you will, on the other hand, find that preparing a something as culturally extravagant as a French delicacy is more of a cakewalk than a strenuous exercise.

The gameplay is about as by-the-numbers as you could probably imagine: add a few ingredients to the mix, and then either blend, combine, or pour said mix into a “palatable” cuisine in order to earn reputation. It’s with said reputation that you can, with a little time and effort, not only figure out how to evolve as a chef, but to also learn how to create even more delicious dishes for your customers. Granted, neither of these things bring anything even minutely original to the table here, but, as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And, honestly, I think I speak for everyone when I say this: you can’t really go wrong with a cozy cooking sim with light mechanics and a wholesome atmosphere. Comprehensible cooking techniques + familiar rags-to-riches progression system  = award-winning formula.

A 101 in Parisian Cuisine

With forty recipes to unlock and master, the game is almost bite-sized enough to sift through in a couple of hours, give or take. And that, unfortunately, brings me to the next question: Is it worth the asking price? In short, no, it isn’t. I mean, sure, it touts a good amount of potential, and it’s certainly pleasant to look at (we’ll touch base on that later), but for $15—a price tag that feels a little heavy-handed given the lack of content—I can’t quite bring myself to say that it’s worth each and every dime. It doesn’t help, either, that there aren’t enough techniques to master, nor are there enough original recipes to create with the ingredients that you can unlock along the way. Add the fact that there isn’t any endgame material to chomp through, and you’ve got quite the lackluster experience.

As I briefly mentioned earlier, Cook For Love does at least have some genuinely tasty art pieces to gawp at. In a true Parisian style, each recipe does in fact come equipped with its own form of identity and layer of pizzazz. It’s these quirky hand-drawn styles, and perhaps the inclusion of a cozy and atmospheric tinge, that propel Cook For Love from a textbook iteration of a familiar cooking simulator into something slightly more on-brand and authentically inspired. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an imitation of a higher pedigree, but it’s not quite the shameless cash grab that it could’ve been.

Short and Sweet

There’s no denying the fact that Cook For Love has a lot of pleasant surprises—its cutesy visuals, being the standout aspect of the entire blueprint, for example. With that said, the game itself does fall short in one area, in particular: the entertainment value. Sadly, as the vast majority of the game’s core mechanics are condensed into simple button prompts and other basic actions, there just isn’t all that much creative space for you to flex your culinary flair. And it’s because of this lack of freedom that, even with all the appropriate utensils and ingredients at your disposal, creating dishes for your clientele just isn’t all that satisfying, much less rewarding, unfortunately. It’s engaging in short bursts, for sure, but at no point does it do enough to make you want to progress further into its recipe book.

Suffice it to say, Cook For Love isn’t a game that dares to hold a candle against the likes of Chef Simulator or any other cooking simulator with complex gameplay infusions. If anything, it makes more of an effort to compete with the likes of Cooking Mama and, well, just about any other family-friendly sim that utilizes the same paper cutout templates and mechanics. But that’s fine, provided that you don’t mind substituting a whole lot of technical polish for a slightly less complicated version of a tougher IP. Either way, if it s a cozy cooking sim that you’re on the market for, then there’s every chance that you’ll get a good kick out of this short but oddly sweet banquet of baked goods.

Verdict

Cook For Love might not strike all of the right notes, but for a game that proudly represents the beginner-friendly banner and rolls with it, despite being something of a watered-down interpretation of a much, much more complex cooking sim, there’s a surprising amount of variation in its tone and palette. Conceptually, it serves its purpose of being a clean, simple, and mechanically digestible stepping stone in the culinary arts — and that’s almost a delicacy in itself, though, perhaps more so in the eyes of a slightly younger sous chef than the average Michelin cook. Sure enough, it lacks the technical polish and vigorous discipline of a traditional cook ‘em up sim, but it’s still a hearty little dish with a quality amount of flavorful ingredients.

I’ll admit, even the most adorned components don’t necessarily justify the cost of admission here. In fact, a $15 price tag is a tad insulting, given the sheer lack of content and dynamism in the game’s mechanics and catalog of ingredients. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a good enough reason for you to stick around and see its story through to the bitter (or sweet) end, but given the little amount of time that it devotes to churning out a campaign that’s both drawn-out and engaging, it does beg the question of whether or not the folks over at RedDeer wanted to satisfy their consumers, or if they simply had the intention of making a profit from an otherwise mediocre or half-baked cooking game.

To make it absolutely clear, Cook For Love isn’t the gut-busting five-course meal that you would naturally expect from a by-the-letter cooking sim. Having said that, if you’re the sort of foodie who enjoys the little things, then you might just enjoy hacking out a few microwaveable dishes here.