I wasn’t sure I would even like Order Up! when I first started playing it, because of the frustrating experience I had with Cooking Mama and the unresponsive controls on the Wii. But running these virtual restaurants was actually not that bad.
In Order Up! you begin as a lowly cook in a fast-food place called Burger Face. But things don’t go so well, and so you decide to open your own diner and grow in popularity to participate in the cook-off with other great chefs.
Your tasks at cooking station go from flipping burgers to slicing tomatoes or flipping omelettes. It is separated into four areas: cutting board, stove, deep fryer and griddle Oven and food processor are separate icons on the top right portion of the screen, so you don’t actually interact with them except for dragging something to the appropriate icon.
You use the griddle to cook burgers, steaks, fry eggs and make pancakes. These items all have to be prepared on both sides, so you must flip them when the indicator reaches green. Match the two sides on the green area to get a perfect item every time. The stove top is used for omelettes, boiling pasta, saute onions and cooking other things. The same indicator is there, but a little different, with a temperature gauge as well. If the item is in a pot, you have to stir so it won’t boil over. If it’s in the frying pan, you need to flip it so it doesn’t burn, or worse, set the station on fire. The deep fryer is obviously for french fries and other fried foods. Usually you can tell something is ready by looking at the steam coming out of it.
On the cutting board you will be slicing tomatoes, grating cheese, chopping onions, carving meat or preparing lettuce. The motions aren’t always the same though. For grating, you need to shake the remote as fast as you can, there is an indicator for the timer ticking down as the prep time goes from perfect to bad. For slicing and chopping, there will be two yellow lines as your guide, and you have to cut when they move together to form a single line. For the lettuce, you must pull the leaves apart with a yanking motion as quick as possible. For carving, you move the Wii-mote back and forth as if using a large knife, and to be honest, this was probably the toughest task for me since I could never get a good result. Instead, I’d just pass it to an assistant.
You can hire assistants by checking the daily newspaper. To have them do whatever task, just drag the ingredient onto their icon. The background will change color to indicate how close that ingredient is to be ready. Assistant chefs won’t be able to do everything though, and they do a few things better than others. They also get tired and will fall asleep on the job if you work them too much. To wake them up, you need to do quite a bit of shaking.
All this is done usually while managing two to four orders, so the trick is definitely multitasking so your prepared dishes don’t get cold while waiting on the counter. Try to prepare everything in a way that the last step is cooking the actual dish and serve them all as hot as possible, and your customers will be happy.
Order Up! makes things a bit more complex once you unlock spices and more recipes. Customers will have a specific craving for a certain spice, so when you take an order you can click on their picture to get a hint. The sea captain likes salty things, the cowboy likes BBQ sauce, someone else has a sweet tooth. Spices can be bought at the market and preparing dishes with the right ones gives you an extra tip. You also need the spices to impress the food critic, which is the key to advance to the next restaurant.
You can purchase extra recipes outside your diner by checking the menu board. Chef’s specials are bought in the Black Market and they cost quite a bit, so you need to work hard to afford them all and earn a star.
There are a few mini-games around as well. Some happen in the kitchen, one if you set the station on fire (you must extinguish the fires) and another is a rat invasion (you flick them off the counter). A health inspector will come by to check on how well you clean the dishes, so scrub as fast and as well as you can. Outside, you might see the paper boy fall off his bike, so you can help him pick up the newspapers as the truck drops them off. And at the spice vendor, you can play a chopping game for some extra coins.
Graphically, Order Up! is a very simple cartoony and colorful game. The characters are these bean-shaped things with all kinds of funny faces, and you will find the most detail in the cooking ingredients and prepared dishes. The music is fitting, the voice acting is fun and adds to the caricatures of the characters, and the sound effects are spot-on. If something is frying, it sounds like it really is frying.
Although it could have used a few more restaurants to go through (only four seems a bit short) and even if it lacks a multiplayer mode (a cook-off with a friend would have been great to have), Order Up! is still an entertaining and fun game that anyone can play. With a pinch of Diner Dash and a handful of Cooking Mama, if you liked either of these games Order Up! is definitely for you.
Special thanks to Sheree Johnson, Matt Scholsberg and Zoo Games for providing a copy of this title.