Some recipes have three pages of ingredients, which can create an artificial challenge. Why not extend the same courtesy to an error that doesn’t even make sense in the context of the game? The challenge should rightly be coming from how you manage your time and order queue, not from being forced to send out dishes that any sensible cook would scrap. Several recipes will lockout button presses for previous steps as you advance through them, preventing you from ruining a dish through a misclick. Pulling undercooked food is all the more frustrating because the game already has safeguards in other places to prevent similar mistakes. One mistake is enough to essentially fail a run. At least let me scrap the dish and try to re-make it against the running clock of the customer’s patience. I’m not saying that I should be able to make mistakes without consequence, but the challenge is time management. One wrong press and you’ve thrown your whole run away.
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The same could be said of adding an extra ingredient to a dish. But within the context of the game, it’s like pulling a pan off of the fire and deciding that it is impossible to put it back on. I pressed the button too early and deserve a penalty. This instantly demotes the dish from being successful, robbing you of your gold medal run. Since the entire order queue is controlled with the X button on a controller, it is all too easy, especially in the midst of a rush of orders, to accidentally press X on an order that is still cooking. After a certain amount of time, you can then move on to plating the chicken and smothering it with gravy.Įasy enough, though the controls are fairly cramped. For example, if you’re cooking a chicken fried steak, you have to cook the chicken in oil. At face value, these timers give you a bit of breathing room before having to take the next step on a dish. There are mechanics at play that push the difficulty from ‘challenging’ to what I would call ‘bullshit.’ The primary offender has to do with cooking timers. Herein lies my biggest complaints with the game. After all, what kind of hack cook couldn’t see that last customer didn’t want tomatoes in their salad?! But making a mistake is all too easy and is entirely irreversible. In the middle of a rush, messing up would force me through all five stages of grief in a single instant before restarting in a vain attempt at perfection. Just one measly mistake is the difference between hitting a gold medal and being dumped down to silver. Each mistake can be extremely costly on the three-level grading system used in the game.
![cook serve delicious 3 cook serve delicious 3](https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/article/2020/08/13/cook-serve-delicious-3-08-13-20_feature.jpg)
I’m not exaggerating when I say that CSD3 has brought out stronger emotional responses in me than any other game this year. One wrong click anywhere along the line throws out your whole run.