Shakes on a Plane

I run a mental scorecard whenever a co-op task-management game lands on my desk: depth of order complexity, level variety, control responsiveness, and post-completion hooks. Shakes on a Plane checks some of those boxes with genuine charm, misses others in ways that are hard to ignore, and lands somewhere in mixed-review territory that the Steam score (57% positive across 45 reviews) reflects pretty accurately. The core loop puts one to four players in the role of flight attendants scrambling to fill orders for shakes, burgers, coffee, and other fast food items before the plane touches down and passengers hand out their ratings. Each level is a self-contained puzzle of inefficient galley layouts, and the game does a solid job of stacking new wrinkles on top of that baseline. A few levels in, passengers start wandering the aisle, and turbulence hits them like a bowling ball unless you physically throw them back into their seats. Later stages introduce conveyor belts that ferry ingredients, open hatches that swallow food (and careless crew members), and warp-hole gimmicks courtesy of an alien subplot that exists mostly as a narrative wrapper around the cooking competition framing. Each playable character also carries a unique special ability, which adds a thin layer of role selection before a run. None of this reaches the mechanical richness of the Overcooked series, but as level variety goes, Huu Games clearly put thought into keeping layouts surprising. The problems are real and reviewers across the board flag the same two: control precision and content longevity. Picking up a tray, adding items to it, and delivering it cleanly requires the game's interaction logic to correctly read your position relative to multiple objects at once, and it frequently does not. You will mash the action button, watch your character perform the wrong operation, and lose precious seconds while a passenger's satisfaction meter drains. Solo players have it harder still; the difficulty curve was rebalanced post-launch in a patch, but running two characters simultaneously or leaning on the AI companion remains a chore rather than a convenience. The single gameplay mode (main campaign, no alternates) means that once you have cleared the level list and chased three-star ratings, there is no structural reason to return. No secret collectibles, no endless mode, no challenge rooms. Where the game genuinely earns its existence is in the three- or four-player local co-op session. Communication collapses, someone drops a milkshake on a turbulent stretch, someone else tries to hurl a wandering child back into seat 14B at exactly the wrong moment, and the resulting chaos produces the kind of accidental comedy that makes couch co-op worth owning a couch for. The cartoon top-down presentation is clean enough to read under pressure, colour-coded order timers are legible, and the soundtrack accelerates as the landing countdown ticks down in a way that genuinely raises the pulse. Technical performance is also a non-issue; the game runs smoothly at high frame rates on modest hardware. Steam Remote Play received a post-launch patch that brought it to a functional state for players without local friends, though lag over long distances remains an acknowledged limitation. For strategy and sim players visiting this genre for a lighter session, there is not much here in the way of deep decision-making or build variety. The order management asks for quick spatial reasoning and communication, not long-term planning. Think of it as a palate cleanser at a significant discount, not a destination purchase at full price. Diego, Scout Team

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