Ophelia Payne

Food Truck Chef – Full Course Edition from SOEDESCO and Nukebox Studios allows you to manage your very own food truck. I generally enjoy games with this sort of mechanic, something very methodical, and I have played many similar games of this genre. Some good, and some not so good.

In this game, you’ll be joining Emily on a global culinary journey, travelling through multiple types of cuisine. The USA, Mexico, Asia…you’ll be preparing multiple recipes through hundreds of levels. Your first few levels are creating pasta dishes, and you are taught the basic mechanics. Put the pasta on a plate. Heat the sauce, add the sauce to the pasta and serve the customer. The client leaves their money on the counter. Remember to collect it. If you leave the money on the counter, another customer won’t approach that spot at your window. The quicker you are, the better the payment. Ultimately, you are aiming for 3 stars in each level. BE sure to watch the indicator bar by each customer, indicating their patience and how long they will wait for their order.

Playing on PC, everything can be done using the mouse, so it’s very basic mechanically.

As you work through the levels on each culinary map, you will also complete missions and tasks where you can collect coins and XP. Use these coins in the shops to upgrade ingredients, kitchen equipment and event decorations for outside the food truck. Each of these upgrades helps you create a dish faster (like making multiple beverages at once), increase its value per unit served or even increase the patience that a customer will have in waiting.  Some of these are more basic, like serving your first customer or burning your first dish. Others will accumulate over time, serving 50 red sauce pastas, completing 15 levels in a row without burning a dish, or serving 50 cups of coffee. Some are very specific, but as you continue to play, they will unlock, like serving 50 customers wearing glasses.

There are over 800 recipes to create, 19 locations to cook in and over 700 levels to complete.  Each map location specializes in a different type of food, pasta, BBQ, tacos, sushi, pizza…it’s all here. Each menu has a drink option as well.

As mentioned earlier, your goal is to get 3 stars in each level. If you fail to do so, you can still move on to the next level (provided you hit the minimum number of coins required in that level), or you can replay the level to try to get 3 stars. You can jump back to any previously played levels at any time, too. 

I love the bright and simple graphics, but I had to mute the repetitive music. I didn’t see a way to lower the volume and there wasn’t enough variety to have it be unobtrusive.

While this was easy to play on PC using a mouse, I think I would have preferred to play this on the Switch with touch controls. I have played similar games to this on my phone and always found the touch screen to feel like a perfect match for the mechanics. It feels like the perfect medium for something to take on the go with you, and would be great to kill time while travelling. This is a fun game to pick up whenever you want to play a few levels, and it is currently under $10USD on Steam (only a few dollars more on the Nintendo shop).

Until next time…be good to yourself and be good to each other.

**Special Thanks to SOEDESCO and Press Engine for the review code**