Cooking Simulator VR: Reinforce Your Time Management Skills
Cooking Simulator VR is a decent game when it comes to VR implementation and Mechanics.
This game will strongly reinforce your time management skills, and your attention to detail.
You have a sandbox mode as well as a career mode, as having a good amount of modes to play is important to most games.
Story Mode is well written, but the tasks are very much mundane and repetitive after an hour of playing.
But Lets dive a little deeper.
Level Design And Game Play
From the start, the game recommends you do the tutorial, which is quick and painless and gets you right into the kitchen.
As you start your career, you are given minimal recipes to work with, and the pacing of the orders is well mannered and doesn’t stress you much out at all.
At the end of the day of cooking, the kitchen manager will tell you how well you did and how the restaurant is doing.
There is also a cleaning stage that prompts you to clean up for the next day, which is a nice touch or else you’re going into the next day unorganized and in chaos.
You Are able to buy more recipes and upgrade your dining and run events as well, as well as seasonal events which would be cool for content creation during certain times of the year.
Using Items and kitchen equipment can be a little clunky and at the worst times, buggy. It seems that the developers have decided not to give the items another pass in VR, as i have found quite a few issues with the spatula using osmosis, and my wooden cutting board has defied the laws of physics and absorbed an infinite amount of water when i decided to clean it in between cooking things.
I found that this was a visual bug, because it didn’t not fill up a pot with water at all or calculated anything going in. I found this to be the most immersion ruining things while in the kitchen.
Comfort and Controls
They have released an update which fixes some of the issues regarding holding the plate a certain way as you are delivering it to the wait staff.
With the valve index controllers, it was a bit odd to push and hold my wrists down while holding a plate and it made pouring tomato soup (Which i got 5 starts on!) a chaotic experience.
With the new controller offset update, im sure this will negate any spilling and more messes.
Be Sure to make and set this controller offset change to optimize your play and experience!
Implementation And Immersion
Becoming Immersed in Cooking Simulator VR is some of the better immersion i have experienced so far in VR.
I would rank it up there with games like FS2020 and Onward.
I say this because you are constantly hands on with your controllers and using things in 3D space. This keeps your head in the game at all times.
I cannot say the same for Implementation.
Selecting a plate on a stack of items on the table feels like im petting my cats ear the wrong way, and it wants me to scratch it somewhere else.
Lets not even get into the clipping and collision and how clunky flipping a salmon fillet is.
You practically have to use your force of will and will the dang thing to your spatula, or use osmosis to meld your spatula down 2 dimensions to even get it under the food.
There is no real penalty for negative actions such as using food that you dropped on the floor, or even putting your hands in boiling hot water to pull out potatoes.
Final Thoughts
Perhaps They can clean up and polish up the features regarding holding items and impingement better VR techniques, but I cannot say Cooking simulator was ever a great fit for VR, as it was not built from the
ground up considering what VR techniques need to be implemented to bring such an amazing experience. Buy this game if you have nothing else to do and don’t already work a busy, hard working life style.
This game will teach you time management by making you do two things at once, but needs more focus on the VR experience, as to many things feel over looked and quickly implemented without much polish or fix.
Is this a freemium game?
No its though Steam and its not done very well.