When I was a child, I was determined to be a chef. I grew up in kitchens learning to cook and bake. Some of my earliest memories are of making dough for my grandmother and helping my grandfather cook the chicken. The Food Network played over and over on my TV. I would even go to the library and spend hours reading cookbooks and autobiographies of famous chefs, dreaming of when I would be able to write my own.
A career as a chef never panned out, but my deep love for the culinary arts has never wavered. I think that’s what I like most about Cooking Simulator VR: Despite its unusual physics-based gameplay, it gave me just the tiniest taste of being in a proper kitchen again – straight out of Quest 2. No will help you become a five-star chef, but she WILL helps you gain a basic understanding of cooking while providing a truly engaging gameplay loop.
VR Cooking Simulator: What I liked
Cooking Simulator VR is as pure in premise as its name suggests. It’s a simple concept, but the way you interact with the world makes it feel like more than just a novelty.
If you need to brush something with clarified butter, you’ll need to remove the lid and be careful not to pour too quickly. Knives need to be held steady when cutting things into quarters or else you won’t end up with remotely uniform pieces. Not sure if you’ve mixed a sauce correctly? You’ll have to reach in and take a taste to find out.
For this reason, most of my time in Cooking Simulator VR was spent in the game’s sandbox mode. Interacting with your kitchen is fun in the silliest way possible, and I loved not being constrained by a time limit.
I don’t know why flipping raw steaks is so satisfying, but the rocking physics has me amazed. And yes, me He did grab a pair of tongs and pretend to be a crustacean chef like any normal person would.
Sandbox mode also lets you make any recipe à la carte so you can go through the steps at your leisure. While I enjoyed playing in the kitchen and practicing recipes at my own pace, the game’s career mode is just as fun.
Your goal in career mode is to take your restaurant from the bottom up. Doing so means building a reputation for serving fast, high-quality food. This isn’t as easy as it might sound, and it won’t be long before it all becomes a frantic frantic race that tests your patience as much as your speed.
You have a certain amount of time to prepare each dish ordered by a customer, and when the recipes start to get complicated, it gets intense. Cooking a seasoned trout is one thing, but soon you’ll be jumping between different workstations in your kitchen to try and manage simmering pots of sauces, hot ovens full of meat and pans of simmering vegetables all immediately.
Once your cooking is done, it’s a matter of quick plating and hustling to make sure it’s served before the timer runs out. It’s nothing short of chaotic.
Career mode is stressful, but in a way that creates an engaging gameplay loop. There is a real sense of relief and satisfaction in getting through another day of customer orders with five-star ratings for every dish.
You’ll earn upgrades and perks throughout career mode, such as increasing the amount of tips you receive or the ability to examine the quality of a dish before serving it. You can also unlock decorations to customize your kitchen to your liking.
As fun as it is, the career mode is ultimately simple and having that sense of progression really helps add some depth to the overall experience.
VR Cooking Simulator: What I Didn’t Do
If I have one real criticism of Cooking Simulator VR, it’s that there’s a lack of community features other than the included tables. Multiplayer would definitely be nice, but I don’t think it’s always as easy for developers to implement as some people might believe.
What I WILL What I really like to see, though, is a way to create custom recipes that you can share in a sort of player-created cookbook. Community download of dishes to use in career mode would be fantastic. I love the idea of creating the most chaotic, complicated recipe imaginable and ruining another player’s day because their customers ordered it.
VR Cooking Simulator: Should You Buy It?
Whether or not you will enjoy Cooking Simulator VR depends on what you expect from it. Don’t think it’s a tough cooking card, because that’s definitely not the vibe; it’s more of a no-nonsense culinary playground. If you’re looking for a more guided experience than the freeform kitchen sandbox, I think there’s a lot to enjoy in career mode.
Cooking Simulator VR isn’t as easy to recommend as some of the other great games in Quest 2, simply because it’s a bit convenient. That said, I enjoyed it so much that it threatens to dethrone Little Cities as my favorite Quest 2 game of the year. Immersion is such an important part of a VR for me, and Cooking Simulator VR never took me out of its kitchen.