Cooking Simulator VR

My honest read on Cooking Simulator VR is that it pulls off something most VR sims fumble: it gives you two completely different games stitched together by a shared physics engine, and both halves are genuinely worth your time. Career mode casts you as a rookie chef grinding through timed customer orders, starting with modest dishes like tomato soup and baked trout before the ticket rail starts filling up with multi-component plates that demand actual memorisation of step-by-step recipes. You earn cash between shifts to buy new equipment, unlock perks for things like tip bonuses or pre-service dish inspection, and slowly build out your kitchen's reputation. The pacing is slow to ramp up, so short sessions work better than marathon runs, but the loop of nailing a difficult plate under pressure and walking away with five-star ratings is genuinely satisfying. Sandbox mode is where the physics engine stops pretending to be respectable. Propane tanks on open flames go up with the gusto you'd expect. Bottles stack and topple when you hurl potatoes at them. Grease fires spin out of control while you half-heartedly wave a fire extinguisher. The chaos has limits, though: metal in the microwave produces no sparks, leaving an oven burning too long won't set the food alight, and the destruction ceiling is lower than some trailers imply. Still, the slow-motion toggle in Sandbox is a genuine highlight, letting you julienne vegetables mid-air or carefully observe a pan you've just flung across the kitchen. It's aimless by design, but physics interactions this tactile make aimless feel earned. The VR controls are the core argument for buying this over the flat-screen original. Unscrewing lids, keeping a knife steady through a cut, shaking a salt grinder with actual wrist motion, pouring sauces with a careful tilt, these interactions translate surprisingly well. Wonky moments do creep in: spatula physics can feel slippery when flipping meat, stove dial interaction via button press is hit-or-miss, and the game has no sense of cutting resistance beyond haptic feedback approximation. On the performance side, running many simultaneous interactable objects puts pressure on mid-range rigs, so check your specs before expecting a smooth sandbox session at high settings. The game supports seated, standing, and room-scale play, with bind presets for multiple headsets, which is a sensible accessibility baseline. The elephant in the room right now is the Enhanced Edition update, which rebuilt the game in Unreal 5.5 with 4K visuals and revised physics. The all-time Steam rating sits at a healthy mostly positive across over a thousand reviews, but recent scores have dipped sharply, with a vocal segment of players arguing that the update broke physics fidelity, readability, and stability compared to the version they originally praised. Big Cheese Studio has been pushing quality-of-life patches, including improved UI clarity and cutting resistance tweaks, but buyer sentiment in the short term is genuinely mixed. If you're purchasing now, run it at launch and check the community hub for patch notes before assuming the version you get matches what 2021 reviewers praised. Worth also noting: there is no multiplayer, and leaderboards are the only community feature, a limitation that stings a little given how naturally co-op chaos would fit this kitchen.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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