The New Casual Game Sensation: Cooking Games!
The Apple App Store and Google Play Store feature tens of thousands of different casual games, with hundreds of different game types. There are the popular Match-3 games, hyper-casual games that you can play without thinking, idle games, design games, racing games… the list seems endless! However, one type of game has lately emerged as a very popular favorite, with dozens of entries receiving awesome reviews from customers around the world. It’s a genre that may surprise you — cooking games!
What is a ‘cooking game?’
Cooking games are essentially a form of time management games where the player operates a restaurant. What does ‘operate’ mean? It means you take care of everything! Cooking the food, serving the food, improving the restaurant, and – in the best games – decorating it too!
This may seem easy, but at harder difficulties the time management aspect really comes into play. Customers will be arriving quickly, making a wide variety of orders, and it gets difficult to keep track of everything. You’ll be challenged to remember each order and cook it properly before the customer becomes impatient and leaves.
As you advance, you’ll discover new restaurants with exotic cuisines and an ever growing cast of characters. This diversity is important to ensure the game doesn’t get boring and you’re always on a quest to become a Master Chef and reveal the next restaurant to challenge!
My favorite: COOK IT!
There are many top cooking games out now, with more arriving on the App Store and Play Store every week. With so many, it can be tough to choose the best, but my favorite is ‘Cook It!’ from FlowMotion Entertainment. Why?
- Tap Gameplay: Some cooking games feature drag gameplay, where ingredients must be dragged onto the equipment for cooking and then finished dishes must be dragged to the waiting customers. This gameplay feels slower, and not as fun. In Cook It!, you just tap on each item, allowing you to get in a great cooking game rhythm.
- Colorful Food and Characters: Every cooking game features beautiful graphics, but my favorite is Cook It! The food looks beautiful, across a wide variety of exotic restaurants, each of which has its own hilarious cast of characters to serve.
- Decorations: Cook It! has one feature that no other cooking game seems to have, or at least not that I’ve found… decorating! Each restaurant has specific spots where you can place a selection of adorable decorations, allowing you to design each restaurant to your own taste. It’s so much fun to serve up tasty treats in a restaurant that feels like your own!
- A Great Challenge: Cook It! is easy to learn, but tough to master. You’ll feel like a professional chef in the early stages, but as the difficulty increases with each level and restaurant you’ll find you require more tricks, boosts, and attention to move on. If you really need help, you can spend a little money to give yourself some help, but this never feels necessary, which is nice.
For all these reasons, Cook It! is my favorite among the newest cooking games. Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think! What do you love? Designing your own restaurant? A real cooking challenge? Preparing food for funny customers? Let’s get cooking together!
