Got this game on the advice of a friend

[Polaris2013]

Got this game on the advice of a friend, and this is my feedback.

Juggling chores can be a fun resource management challenge. I played Cake Mania previously, and that was fun for a while. Cook, Serve, Delicious (CSD) however doesn't really work for me. My main issue with the game is how grindy it is.

Using the tickets to do the hard modes is fun, but then I run out of tickets and its off to career. Unfortunately, the career develops far too slowly! Just working to 2 stars is an excercise in tedium. To make it worse, the incentive is all about getting 100% perfect days because that is worth about 3x as much money as a 99% day. So I am forced to make my menu as simple as possible to reduce the chance of an error, in order to avoid the grindiness, which unfortunately just makes the game boring as ****. Lose-lose. So my first concrete feedback is that the 100% reward, and how large it is, is a horrible incentive for the player to have. The second concrete thing is there needs to be a way to juice the game up (make it harder) without grinding corndogs and beer for days on end in the search of more. The game should be intersting on day 1, but it isn't. It's interesting with tickets, but to get ticket you have to play career and career is just torture.

My last feedback is that the UI design is not very good on keyboard. It really annoys me how the game is all keyboard during sessions, then the menus in between levels are all mouse. Flipping thru pages on lists of things is unintuitive with the buttons being a mileu of "next/previous" synonyms placed in non-standardized locations for each UI list. The default hotkeys are not placed for ease-of-access, for instance making them all accessible with left hand (luckily this last element can be fixed at least).

Hope you guys can fix these problems on CSD2.

[chubigans]

All I can really say is I pretty much agree with you on everything as I went in to plan CSD 2 (I'm aware of how grindy it is, and it never occurred to me to do keyboard shortcuts for menus), so you can look forward to just about all of that being resolved in some way!

Also I never intended the perfect days to be the incentive, and in fact you're not making as much money as you think you are by doing simple foods and earning the bonus. In fact I'd wager a day of complex upgraded foods is worth way, way more than the corndogs/pretzels/beer plus $300 bonus. You ought to experiment a bit.

[Ghin]

You're picking corndogs and beer and then complaining the game is too easy. Pick some more interesting foods like Soup, Pizza, Pasta, Steak, Nachos, etc. I recommend Lasagna or Burgers, I really have fun with those for some reason. I don't know how you lasted the 20 days to 1 Star doing that boring menu lol. It's a lot more fun if you pick harder foods and try to challenge yourself with the menu.

[Okihara Jones]

The grind-ness doesn't bother much, but I sure do wish I didn't have to use my Logitech controller instead of my preferred mouse and keyboard. Sadly this means I can only play at home on my Windows 7 desktop, because the controller does not work on my Mac laptop, neither with the game nor OSX.

[Terotrous]

I feel one of the main things that would help this game is removing the "play 20 days" requirement to get to the next star level. I'm always completing all of the other objectives in 5-10 days, then I just have to kill off 10-15 more days to get the next rank, which is pretty dull.

If the intention is for each phase to take roughly 20 days (so the player will have enough money to buy upgrades and such), then the difficulty of the other objectives should be tweaked so they take roughly 20 days for the average player to complete, but someone who is doing very well can advance faster.

[Polaris2013]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I'm glad to see the developer can take some harsh criticism- Sounds like CSD2 will be a great game! Until then I guess I'll just play something else instead.

[Krupo]

I found dates trying to text you while you're in the middle of the dinner rush the height of absurdity, but the rest is great fun - before putting it down, Polaris, do try the game again with more 'advanced' foods. It gets interesting.

[Arucard]

I agree, I've stopped playing a couple times before because I'd get a food that was really difficult and have a bad day, or from the grindy nature. I started playing recently under the feeling my normal days don't need to be perfect, I save that feeling for challenges and battle kitchen.

Though the keyboard shortcuts seem random and unintellligible at first, if you spend a few days with the more complex foods on the menu you begin to memorize and understand them.

If you enjoy using the tickets for more difficult challenges, you should really play a few days at a time (reducing the grind feel) to get to the later stages where it will get a lot more interesting. If you really need a challenge, throw soup, lasagna, pizza, and sushi on your menu.

[Krupo]

Lasagna's not bad. Sushi is fine as long as you don't mix up Toro and Tuna, I find. :)

The shish kebab I hardly ever play with as it's tricky as heck. Not a huge fan of the timing game associated with deep frying, or the crazy tapping for wine.... pretty much everything else is fun in its own way.

I never customized the keys, but you can, and I probably should.

[Arucard]

Well I found after adding the meat and veggie combos, that lasagna took more time since you have to carefully read the description. I got a few ok orders before realizing it said something like, layer it in x, y, z format, then repeat but replace y with n, then x, y, u. But shish kebab seems to be universally avoided.

[Okihara Jones]

cant eat shish kebab to this day without face twitching

10/10 - will go insane again