Cooking Simulator

Pros

• A great choice for a Let's Play
• Nice variety of cooking recipes
• Tons of potential disaster scenarios

Cons

• Challenge levels can become frustrating

Cooking Simulator uses a ridiculous physics engine to provide a game that's equal parts funny, frustrating, and engaging. Cooking Simulator follows in a relatively long line of "simulator" games that are as much about wrestling with controls as they are about simulating the profession they claim to represent. It's a niche that's managed to find success among both gamers who want the most serious challenges and streamers who want to entertain their followers.

At its most basic, Cooking Simulator is pretty basic. You're presented with a virtual industrial kitchen, a stream of customers, and recipes for the dishes you need to create. Even the recipes here aren't too complex. Prepare and combine a few ingredients to get what you want, and call it a day. But the devil is in the details here. Recipes are more formulas than suggestions, and getting a dish out the door the way the customers want it requires some real precision.

Unfortunately, precision is something that's not easy to come by in Cooking Simulator. The physics are deliberately taxing, and it's a reminder that tasks we can complete without even thinking about them become genuinely challenging tasks when you're trying to use a mouse and a keyboard. As dishes become more complex, so do the stakes. This is a game that excels when things are going wrong, and Cooking Simulator has done a great job of creating an environment where there are plenty of things to go wrong. Dropping plates is to be expected, but a wrong chain of events could lead to your entire kitchen burning down to the ground.

Pros

• A great choice for a Let's Play
• Nice variety of cooking recipes
• Tons of potential disaster scenarios

Cons

• Challenge levels can become frustrating