Overcooked: Special Edition Preview
Overcooked became a cult fan favorite soon after it released in 2016 on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. It’s one of the few games out there that encourages players to cooperate in order to succeed at the levels. This local co-op multiplayer mayhem is part of the reason the title is a perfect fit for the Nintendo Switch, which comes with 2 Joy-Cons right out of the box. Now gamers will be able to play the game anywhere, whether they’re at home playing on the TV or out and about.
I’ve played Overcooked for a couple of hours on the PS4 with a friend and I will admit it’s very fun and addicting. At its core is a simple premise: as chefs you must prepare the food for the customers before they storm out. At first this isn’t too difficult, and in fact the both of us sort of just prepared entire meals on our own, but soon found out that we fell behind and couldn’t get the best score possible by playing the game in this manner. Instead, much like a real kitchen at a restaurant does, we had to divide the tasks up to get things really cooking.
Each level will be slightly different and will feature different dishes to create. Most of the tasks are rather simple, requiring you to chop up vegetables or fry up some meat. Once we divided the tasks up between us we fell into a sort of natural rhythm and it became a ton of fun. Sometimes one of us would fall behind and we’d have to help each other out to stay on top of things. As we progressed in the game, the levels became more daunting with crazy kitchen layouts and conveyor belts and more madness. It was a fun experience and one I’d love to try with four players, if only to witness the insanity.
The Nintendo Switch version will have some enhancements. First of all, it will include all of the DLC, which means it gains an extra 14 levels on top of the original 30. It will also contain new recipes and new equipment, even a flamethrower! Overcooked: Special Edition will also make use of the Joy-Con controllers’ HD Rumble for a more tactile experience. Since things happen so fast in the game, the developers are experimenting with the force feedback to give even better ways to communicate to the player what’s happening in the game. Phil Duncan of Ghost Town Games explains:
From my point of view what HD Rumble allows you to do is a completely different kind of force feedback. It allows you more ways to communicate to the player. You can tell them when something is on fire or when something is about to burn out. You don’t even have to look at the screen or listen to the audio, you‘ve got something that instantly tells you something about the game. That great, particularly for a game like Overcooked, when the actions are so quick and so fast and you need to communicate the gameplay instantly.
As a side note I think it would be really cool for developers to actually build games around HD Rumble. It would be really interesting to have a game where you’re all looking at the same screen, but the game is communicating silently to one player to say, you know, ‘you’re it’ or something. Like a game of Werewolf or something like that, where it’s telling you you’re a werewolf just by a subtle rumble in your hand.
I look forward to playing Overcooked: Special Edition later this year on the Nintendo Switch. I’ve already got my cooking party planned!
[Interview Source: Nintendo UK]
Craig has been covering the video game industry since 1995. His work has been published across a wide spectrum of media sites. He’s currently the Editor-In-Chief of Nintendo Times and contributes to Gaming Age.
