Cook Out: A Sandwich Tale is Resolution Games’ latest VR cooperative title that does a real good job at simulating a kitchen rush. Its action-packed culinary levels focus on stacking sandwiches for hungry customers, while each level turns up the heat with bigger challenges until even the toughest chefs cry for uncle.
Set in a lovely animated medieval world, VR users become an aspiring sandwich chef as they move across the realms in search of customers. Through small towns, to a festival and werewolf invasion, the sandwich vendor makes its way to a climactic service for the royal King and Queen in their castle. Like Resolution’s past games including Angry Birds: Isle of Pigs, Cook Out is laid out in stages with three short levels in each one.
This is where the game throws mini “shifts” at you in full force, from an animated mouse looking for a simple sandwich to werewolves demanding unreasonably large orders. Other customer types include rabbits, who are constantly rushing you to finish their orders first. Though deceptively simple at first, Cook Out turns into a fight for survival once the timer on each customer starts counting down. If it’s empty, then does a customer’s patience as they storm off.
Surviving the early levels is an enjoyable coast, with a tutorial and slower rounds showing you how to use your hands. From cutting ingredients with a knife and physically serving a plate, Cook Out was realistic enough to bring back memories of rushing in a kitchen. The VR hands also add some satisfying feedback, which are important in chopping every ingredient for sandwiches.
I also noticed my Oculus Quest Link was able to track my controllers perfectly, even as my hands were moving at breakneck speeds over my kitchen counter. The effort to clear orders was something of a focus for Resolution, who consulted with chefs in making the game a real multitasking nightmare. But that adds more authenticity for Cook Out, which adds a new bar for how cooking games can be pulled off in VR.
“Though deceptively simple at first, Cook Out turns into a fight for survival once the timer on each customer starts counting down.”
Making the experience more authentic is a life-sized, but restrictive kitchen that gives you the essential tools and ingredients needed for work. A utility cleaver can be used to chop down on ingredients, speeding up based on your hands. It’s a sole tool that Cook Out uses for tonics; elixirs which can be bought before starting each round and work as the game’s perks. From creating a one-hit slice for ingredients, slowing down time and using Tofu as a replacement ingredient for anything, Resolution puts up a valiant effort with surrounding you in the virtual kitchen. I would have loved to see some options for bigger work spaces, as well as the ability to cook at other tables on single player.
But instead of a sandbox-approach to creativity, Cook Out instead sticks to the customer service. Players are required to make sandwiches with specific ingredients in a specific order, which later gets more complicated with special items and needing to grill one before stacking another one on. There’s little margin for error in making an order, which the game will constantly tell you about any small blunders. I appreciated the game’s hectic nature, especially when Cook Out emphasizes you to be fast and precise.
A strange level of focus and concentration are needed to score points on each level’s three challenges while it will definitely help clear the customers out. This only becomes a bigger demand from players as they navigate through to the third and fourth towns. As I focused my attention on one sandwich, I’d also have to keep up with other customers running out of patience. This anxiety can also build up for players getting into Cook Out while triggering some of the less welcome memories from my time working at real kitchens.
Cook Out seems short, until the harder levels set players back by hours of attempting to beat it. It’s hard to be frustrated at a game Resolution designed to be densely challenging, but would have benefited to give single players more of a fighting chance. Multiplayer easily steps on the game’s single player campaign mode, for better and for worse. With players, the game starts to feel as fun as it should be and up to four players stack sandwiches together.
Resolution was smart to give each player their own specific ingredients, requiring most sandwiches to be made together. An open communications line is also key to calling out orders, adding to the authenticity of asking for help. The result is an enjoyable team-building game which divides challenges equally. However, this type of balancing doesn’t happen as much with single player. Since the game was built for co-op with other real players, this is where Cook Out starts to give lone chefs an unreasonably short stick. Its unbalanced single player mode can also be enough for players to stop once they’ve had enough.
“The result is an enjoyable team-building game which divides challenges equally.”
Enter the robot chef, who serves as an AI companion for players. Their job is to give sandwiches ingredients that aren’t included in your fridge and help lighten the work in levels. But Cook Out‘s sole AI is incredibly broken at launch and starts throwing ingredients onto a sandwich before you were able to add on a bread, ham, cheese, condiment or tomato. As much as I tried, the AI’s programming would kick in to put their assigned ingredient on a sandwich without waiting for me. This throws off the orders of sandwiches and can cost players of completing certain challenges.
Resolution has also made the robot more of a problem than an extra hand, as it can run out of power and go to sleep. Turning a nearby crank to recharge is can be cumbersome and felt more like a punishment for not having other players joining me on single sessions. Harder levels will also open up the dishwasher, requiring players to clean plates to re-serve next customers. A grill also unlocks later on for special orders, including lobster tails and veggies players need to grill before adding it on a sandwich. All of these felt like fun mini games, but the game does little to slow down for you on these parts. When the robot places something too early, players can step in to pick out the ingredient. Another problem sets in for Cook Out’s inaccurate hand controls up-close, making it easier to serve an imperfect sandwich than fixing it to perfection.
To gamify the experience, Cook Out offers replayable stages for all of its single player levels. This is a treat for those looking to practice by themselves before jumping into a live multiplayer shift with others. Its tutorial is also well-paced, while I found Cook Out‘s opening impressions to be accessible for new chefs. There’s also a survival mode which starts with a possible success before harder customers and orders come to make you anxious. But like its single player mode, this is more fun to play with friends. Keeping the game going after its short campaign are challenges players can try to accomplish by revisiting stages which game them trouble.
Cook Out: A Sandwich Tale has to be one of the most unique titles to come from Resolution Games yet. It also nails the mechanics behind a first-person kitchen game that VR can yet again only accomplish. Developers have taken a great attention to detail in making players understand a chef’s daily time crunch (without all the M-rated banter or pressures of business). The game hits players with a solid blend of puzzles and multitasking orders, while it uses the fantasy setting to make players feel right at home. There’s still much work to be done outside of its core multiplayer gameplay through some bug fixes and much-needed balancing for single cooks. Inconvenience is a VR cook’s biggest enemy in this game, and it takes some guts and a sharp knife to be the best damn sandwich vendor of all the lands.
