“The year is 2041, and the United States is reeling from war. [T]hat hasn’t stopped business from booming.” I don’t know about you, but that certainly wasn’t the first pair of sentences I expected to hear when I began the story mode present within the third entry in the Cook, Serve, Delicious! franchise. I must say, that introduction certainly hooked me in and instilled within me the need to know more about the game’s events. Even though business is apparently still booming, I suspect this war can’t be good for the restaurant industry, or virtually anything else.

However, as this is a Cook, Serve, Delicious game, you’re expected to be concerned primarily with the well-being of the titular restaurant since you serve as its head chef. If you’ve played the previous two titles in this franchise, you probably know exactly how much hard work and dedication it took for you to build the original Cook, Serve, Delicious from a zero-star, hole-in-the-wall type of eatery to what this game calls “the finest restaurant in the world.”

So, how has the war affected your restaurant, then? Has it caused business to boom for you as it presumably has for the defense industry? Not exactly, I’m afraid. In fact, to complete a quote I referenced a second ago, the original Cook, Serve, Delicious is regarded as “the finest restaurant in the world… until it was destroyed twenty minutes ago.” Well, that’s a fine “how do you do!” Although the game had piqued my interest before this point, now it had cemented its grip on my undivided attention.

It is at this point in Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!’s introductory cutscene that you’re introduced to Whisk and Cleaver, two robots who are originally employed as search and rescue operatives. Once they arrive at the wreckage of the skyscraper that once housed your restaurant, they try their best to find anyone who might have made it through the initial blast. Luckily, you managed to survive the building’s annihilation, but now you’re a highly qualified head chef with no restaurant to call home.

Fortunately for you, Whisk proposes to gift you their search and rescue truck with the intent to turn it into a mobile eatery. Whisk posits the idea that she could serve as a driver for your new food truck, with Cleaver filling the role of guardian in case anyone dares attempt to rob you or anything of that nature. Cleaver isn’t given quite enough time to properly protest, but that works out in your favor. As a result, Cook, Serve, Delicious will live on in a much more mobile new form in one year’s time.

By the time you’ve progressed far enough within Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!, you’ll gain the ability to travel to various locales within the continental United States. You start out with several available routes in Boise, Idaho, but you won’t stay there forever. Your journey on what I’ve taken to affectionately calling “The Chefmobile” will take you to several other states such as Texas, Alabama, and Kansas over the course of the campaign.

Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! makes several changes to the formulae that were present in both of its predecessors. I would argue that many of these alterations are both beneficial to players and necessary in order to adapt the gameplay to its new home inside a food truck that’s more than likely barreling down the highway at any given moment. For example, this title asks players to rely more heavily on what are called “holding stations” than either of its predecessors did.

If you’re unfamiliar with the gameplay present within this franchise, a “holding station” is where you can prepare food in advance so that it’s ready at a moment’s notice whenever a customer orders something you’ve got waiting in a holding station. For instance, the tutorial sees you prepare two different types of pretzels in your holding stations to help you get the hang of using them. However, pretzels are quite far from the only menu item that can be prepared in holding stations. You’ll unlock a vast variety of new foods as you complete each route available to you and earn money for doing so efficiently.

I’ll come back to the concept of money and how it’s used within Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! momentarily. Many unlockable foods give you the choice of either using your holding stations to prepare them in advance or cooking them as soon as a customer orders them. Such menu items are marked with a yellow “HS” icon, while foods that strictly must be made ahead of time in a holding station are marked with a red icon of the same variety.

When a menu item is prepared via your holding stations, it has a finite number of servings that can be handed out to customers. Holding station items also have a limited amount of time during which they can be served before they are considered to have gone bad. Running out of available servings of any given menu item or allowing them to expire will require you to make a new batch. This leads me to another change that I think is quite beneficial, especially for new players.

Namely, if you have several customers expecting orders of items that require holding stations, the act of starting new batches of those items will fully restore the patience meters of those patrons. That is to say, once customers know you’ve at least got their orders cooking, they’ll be willing to wait around until the items are ready. However, their patience will begin to deplete again if you wait too long to get those orders dished out. There does exist a method of playing this game that prevents you from having to deal with customer patience levels too. However, that’s another topic to which I’ll return later.

You start out Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!’s campaign with four available holding stations and seven prep stations. The latter of these are used for special orders that can’t be made very far ahead of time in holding stations, or for certain items like those I mentioned earlier that can (but don’t necessarily have to be) made in holding stations. Some holding-station-only foods (such as ribs) also require additional preparation before they can be served. In these cases, such orders will also show up in your available prep stations.

Those of you who have played the original Cook, Serve, Delicious! likely know that having seven prep stations by default is a significant increase from the four you initially had in the first game. Therefore, you might reasonably suspect that having to juggle up to seven orders at a time could easily prove overwhelming. I’d say you’re right about that in several different sets of circumstances, but I’ve found that’s not necessarily always the case. You see, this time around, you’ve got some help.

When you have at least one order that’s completely ready to be served, you can press the Ctrl key on your keyboard to have Cleaver or Whisk automatically serve all completed orders for you. You’ll always know exactly when you can do this because the game provides a corresponding icon near the bottom left portion of your screen. This feature has come in incredibly handy for me thus far, and I wholeheartedly believe it’ll do the same for new players who are still learning the ropes.

Having said that, I must admit that I’m trying to train myself not to rely on this helpful new mechanic too often unless I have very few options. That’s basically for no other reason than because I find it quite fun to roll my finger all the way from the 1 to 7 keys on the top row of my keyboard to serve all those orders. Even so, having Cleaver and Whisk around to assist when I need them is great.

Let us now return to the concept of currency within Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!. You still have to spend portions of your hard-earned money to unlock new menu items, but you do things differently than you may have done before. That’s because, since this title’s events take place in 2041-2, most everyone in the U.S. has begun using a certain cryptocurrency (known as CrumbCoin) for food purchases. I’m honestly not sure whether or not I am (or should be) surprised by this development, but that’s neither here nor there.

Furthermore, each state you visit now has its own unique bill-based currency which you’ll have to convert into CrumbCoin before you can spend it to unlock new foods. It seems this war has had a more profound effect on the country than I expected. For example, since you start out in Boise, you’ll find that twenty so-called “Idaho Potato Skins” are equivalent to one CrumbCoin. As far as I can tell, your customers will all pay you for their orders in their state’s unique currency. Luckily the game handles all the conversion-related math for you.

The more routes you complete on your cross-country tour, the more in-game experience you’ll gain. If you’re anything like me, hearing the phrase “in-game experience” tells you you’ll put that experience toward leveling up. If you guessed that, you’re right on the money. The primary benefit to leveling up is that each time you do, you’re granted a part that you can use to upgrade your food truck. Granted, most upgrades require more than one available part, so you’ll have to save them up fairly often to unlock the upgrades you find most useful.

In case you’re curious, an example of unlockable upgrades are additional holding stations and prep stations which you can toggle off if you don’t want to use them. Other examples include heat lamps that keep holding station foods fresh longer, and certain features that extend the patience of your customers. The primary drawback to the upgrade system I’ve found is that many upgrades are locked until you purchase their prerequisites. Due to that, it may feel like you’ve spent your upgrade parts for nothing from time to time just to eventually gain access to the upgrades you actually want.

There’s quite a bit more I could say about Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!, but I wish to begin my closing statements at this point. I’d like to do so by saying that I’ve often found the gameplay of all three entries in this franchise quite hectic, but without fail, I’ve eventually managed to find a “rhythm” of sorts. Once I’ve gotten myself into that flow, it’s as if the gameplay just “clicks” for me in a sense. I still make my fair share of mistakes on orders, mind you, but I’m usually not scrambling quite as much as I probably would be had I not found my rhythm.

In all honesty, I think this is my favorite in the entire franchise because of the vast majority of beneficial changes to the series’ established foundations. To briefly return to a previous topic, the game includes a “chill mode” that doesn’t require you to deal with impatient customers. That makes the game significantly less stressful in my experience. Granted, you can only earn up to silver performance medals if you enable “chill mode” rather than the coveted gold medals, but I think that’s a small price to pay.

Having said that, I really don’t know why it’s taken me this long to get around to reviewing Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!. Now that I’ve really been able to dive into it and transcribe my thoughts on it, I’m glad I was granted the chance to tell you about this title. Even though I personally find the game paradoxically both stressful and relaxing in equal measure, I wholeheartedly recommend that you add it to your library. That’s especially true if you’ve enjoyed either of its predecessors.

A PC review key for Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! was provided by Vertigo Gaming, Inc. for this review.

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Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!

$19.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Changes to Established Formulae Make Gameplay More Appealing to Newcomers and Existing Players Alike

Cons

• Truck Upgrade System is a Bit Convoluted