Order Up!! Review: 5 Star Experience

Did you ever dream of becoming a chef one day? Well, Order Up!! for the Nintendo 3DS eShop can help you live out your fantasy of cooking meals for others. While it may not be the first cooking simulation game, it is certainly one of the better ones. This happens to also be one of the first retail games to hit the Nintendo 3DS eShop, as technically the European version was released already at retail.

The game starts with your chef character at a simple hamburger fast food chain. It is here where the tutorial shows you the ropes of how to cook and serve basic meals. You don’t stay long here of course and soon you find yourself opening up your first restaurant. It’s from here where the real game begins. It’s your goal to get 5 stars for every one of your restaurants, and once you do that, you can continue on to unlock more restaurants to master. Each restaurant has its own theme, like the Mexican restaurant or the Japanese Steakhouse restaurant. To maximize your restaurant’s potential, you will need to buy extra meal plans to serve and impress the local food critic. The more stars your restaurant has, the more people that will come to your restaurant to feast on your food.

Almost everything you do in this game is done with the touch screen, even cooking the meals and other mini games. Each meal you need to cook is broken up into three or more parts – Each part requiring certain action to prepare it. For example, some veggies require you to slice it up by repeatedly sliding your stylus up and down until done while others require you stir a pod to keep it from over cooking. To do each part to perfection, you will need to slice or peal the ingredients correctly and keep an eye on your pots and pans to make sure your food isn’t over heating, else you will have to deal with the fire.

Like any good chef, you will be able to hire up to two assistants to help out in the kitchen. There are a variety of different assistants to choose from, with some having advantages over others. For example, some assistants turn out better meals you assign them when it involves cutting – While others do better with grilled food. But be sure to not over work your assistants, else they might fall asleep on the job.

The game has a simple look to it, but is also a very charming one. For you 3D lovers out there, don’t worry, the game has pretty good 3D effects to it. I found myself enjoying the 3D aspect of the game. With an odd sort of characters, this is really an entertaining package. The characters presented are somewhat stereotypical, but the game aims to be funny with its choice of odd characters. From your customers to your assistants, you will find yourself amused with their quick one liners as you serve them food. The voice acting and the background music really tends to bring the game to life.

While this game has a lot going for it, there are a few small issues with the game. A very small one deals with the loading in between sections of the game. Usually these are just around 20 seconds. But a main issue is that you do tend to hit these a bit often as you go into a restaurant for the day or travel around the world map. Another issue deals with going between the different cooking stations. You use the d-pad or ABXY buttons to go between the different stations. Sometimes this doesn’t feel responsive as it should be. You might end up over shooting a station and having to redo a portion of a meal because of this. Lastly, another slight issue dealing with cooking the different meals comes with once you complete one meal. Once a meal is completed, a little animation will pop up and show you the completed meal. This tends to get in the way sometimes when you’re in a rush to complete other meals. These are all just minor complaints, and don’t really interfere with the game much other then minor annoyances.

This is a game that is hard to put down in the end. There is plenty of depth and length to this game to keep you coming back for more. Even after you five star every restaurant, there are still more do with unlocking more meals and other tasks to perform. Order Up!! For the Nintendo 3DS eShop is both fun to play and enjoyable with its quaint use of characters that seem to come to life as you play.

Rating: 9/10