The Cooking Game VR

I came into this one expecting basically nothing, and what I got was somewhere between pleasant surprise and mild frustration, which is about as fair a summary as I can give. The Cooking Game VR has been kicking around since a 2018 Early Access drop and only hit full release in August 2024, which tells you a lot about its development pace. The core loop is straightforward even by VR standards: you stand behind a counter in one of two restaurants, a fast food joint or an Italian pizzeria, and physically pick up ingredients, cook them, plate them, and dispatch orders to numbered customer tables using a server NPC. Burgers, hot dogs, fries, pizzas, risotto. Repeat. The motion controls are tracked and 6DOF, so your arms are genuinely doing the work, and reviewers who got sweaty about it were not exaggerating. Where the game briefly earns its keep is the competitive layer. You can go against an AI opponent in the Battle of the Chef mode, or jump into online PvP with cross-platform support, where the objective is simply out-serving the other cook before time runs out. There is a mechanic that lets you steal opponent customers, which adds a thin but real tactical dimension to what would otherwise be pure throughput management. You also share the kitchen with a server NPC whose timing you have to factor in, which is one more variable than most games at this price point bother to add. The campaign runs 30 missions across both restaurants, and each session clocks in at roughly five to fifteen minutes, so the whole single-player side can be cleared in a weekend if you are consistent. The problems are not subtle. Depth runs out fast. The food has exactly two states, raw and cooked, there are no intermediate steps, no degradation timers, no physics-based plating. The tray collision detection is oversensitive enough that a slightly off throw will slot your burger into the wrong order and cost you the round. There is no in-game recentering option, so if your play space is not already dialed in before you boot, you are going to spend time fighting your environment rather than the AI. The visual style is cartoon-cute and works fine, but the background never changes and the overall production level feels like it belongs to 2018, which, again, it basically does. Player complaints about the lack of in-game settings, no difficulty options, and a near-absent UI are legitimate gripes that have not been fully addressed across six years of development. Who is this for? Casual VR players who want a low-commitment, physically active experience and have someone to play against online. Cross-platform support means finding a match against Quest users is at least theoretically easier than it would be on a PCVR-only pool. The competitive mode has genuine replay value if the PvP population is active, but with only around 51 Steam reviews total, you are not looking at a thriving ranked ecosystem. Treat this as a party trick for friends who just got a headset, or a ten-minute warm-up before something meatier, and the limited scope will not bother you. Go in expecting Overcooked-level complexity or any kind of long-term progression system and you will be disappointed inside the first hour.

Fred · Scout Team

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