Cuisineer Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Have you ever wanted to run a restaurant? How about fighting weird monsters from an isometric perspective with food-themed weapons, like giant meat tenderisers? What if you could combine these two things by feeding the pieces of the monsters you’ve killed to your restaurant customers? Well, don’t be too shocked, but that’s exactly what Cuisineer is! The game begins with you, Pom, who appears to be a catgirl, returning to your hometown of Paell and finding the family restaurant in a state of disrepair. Her parents have gone away, racking up a debt in the process that someone needs to pay. Obviously, as is typical in debt-em-ups as I am now calling them, you’re the person that has to pay this off and you’re going to do it using oversized spatulas and your parents disused restaurant.

Cuisineer gives a very strong first impression. It’s bright, colourful and well animated, and it feels great to play. The combat in particular is incredibly punchy, you can feel the impact of your weapons and it’s very responsive and quick. Running the restaurant is also a strange delight, as always in games like this. There’s just something about dashing around preparing dishes, taking payments, and occasionally stopping a dine and dasher that’s just inherently enjoyable.

The problem is that it is repetitive to the extreme.

Let’s start with combat. After that first run and getting a feel for how the fighting works, my second was immediately felt too familiar with its environments. I’m obviously starting off in the same zone so I expect the theming to be similar, but I was fighting through map tiles that I’d been through on my first run. I suppose I expected a much wider variety of tiles or more granular procedural generation, but every run thereafter I encountered the same again and again. It got incredibly same-y very quickly – even the enemies are usually in the same place and of the same type as last time.

The restaurant has a similar, but more pronounced issue. Whilst it is, much like the