Ghost Town Games are back with a deluxe edition to delight all you keen cookaholics. Overcooked! All You Can Eat features the entire Overcooked! back catalogue, fully remastered in 4K. This is a menu with all the trimmings, along with generous extra servings of multiplayer good times that may or may not be served from a kitchen that’s currently on fire. It’s tense, it’s definitely not sanitary, the Swedish Chef is here for some reason – Overcooked! is back and ready for the next generation. Who’s ready for seconds?
All You Can Eat instantly addresses one of the biggest obstacles to enjoying Overcooked! with your friends, serving up online multiplayer and crossplay. It’s even possible to mix it up with with local and online, meaning you can have two players locally and the rest invited online. This is an especially important addition to the game given that it’s a bit complicated getting four people together in the same room at the moment. This also means that All You Can Eat has broken free of its couch co-op restrictions. Will we see professional Overcooked! Esports teams next year? Well, probably not, but it is easier than ever to stuff your kitchen full of people that’ll eventually loathe one another.
A few user reviews on Steam have stated some difficulty getting into online games with friends, but we didn’t encounter any problems during our time with it – the multiplayer/crossplay seems to work quite smoothly in general. All You Can Eat is a game of thinking quickly, and any input lag could be difference between life and chef. Thankfully that wasn’t something we encountered, and the only slowdown was our weaker team members struggling to follow basic instructions (Sorry, I don’t do well in situations where a tiny axolotl is shouting at me like Gordon Ramsay on steroids – Nil).
You actually don’t realise just how much work has been done to the original Overcooked! levels without booting it up. The difference is practically night and day; and the difference between the two games (released two years apart, with a significant amount of production value increase) has vanished entirely. All You Can Eat looks incredible in 4K, a vibrant cartoon come to life, a huge array of different level themes truly shining through in all the various hazards and little background details. Calling it a remaster doesn’t really do it justice. Everything that’s come out of Ghost Town Games and Team17‘s shared kitchen is here, tweaked to visual perfection, not a hair out of place.
For those unfamiliar with Overcooked!, the game is a is a frantic time-management game where players must race against the clock to serve an array of different meals to their impatient customers. Each level is designed exceedingly well; and there are a wide variety of environmental hazards to contend with in each kitchen. Some are nothing more than rage-inducing but it’s all part of the challenge.
Campaign, survival and practice mode are also included, as well as a new assist mode which offers players new options in order to modify their gameplay. Accessibility is a big feature here and the ability to scale UI, use dyslexia friendly text, and adapt the gameplay for a less hectic experience are all massively appreciated.
With cross-platform multiplayer, and with the aid of Steam’s remote play – more people can join the fun than ever before. Making Overcooked! so widely accessible, in so many ways, is a real triumph. It really reaches full steam when you’ve got four people running around at the same time, trying (and failing) to co-ordinate their culinary efforts. You’ll feel rage like you’ve never felt before, but you’ll keep going back for more, much like eating an entire party cake in one sitting.
Overcooked!: All You Can Eat – Kitchen nightmare, or Michelin starred?
This is basically Overcooked!‘s ultimate form. The visuals have been brilliantly refreshed, the multiplayer has more or less every feature you could possibly ask for, and there’s so many levels and variations to tackle. Whether you loved the original releases or you’re just about to tuck in for the first time, All You Can Eat is the ultimate serving of Overcooked! – don’t miss out!
You can buy Overcooked: All You Can Eat on Steam now. Check out more of our game reviews here.
