Iron Chef: PC

Positives:

• For the most part, the visuals are pretty decent. It’s nothing mind-blowing but it looks nice enough.
• Cooking in the game is enjoyable, and the systems in place to cook the food are good. There’s a noticeable change in color for food that’s being fried, chopped items look like they’re supposed to no matter how you chop them.
• Completing recipes earns you experience points, and leveling up lets you unlock new skills and purchase perks. Skills range from giving you the ability to hold food still while you’re chopping it, to seeing the temperature/’doneness’ of a food item in a closed oven. Perks come in three tiers and usually offer a 10%/30%/50% improvement of something such as tip amount per dish or lower ingredient costs.
• At the start of a new career mode, orders come in one by one. Each order has a time limit that should give you plenty of time to make it, even if you’re not prepared. As you progress through the game you’ll start getting more than one order at a time, which is how the game ramps up the difficult along with the more complex recipes.
• As you increase your fame ranking, you’ll unlock newer, more complex recipes that provide a bit more satisfaction from making them, as well as some more money. There’s a pretty wide variety of recipes available in the game.
• Money in the game is mainly used to buy ingredients or kitchen equipment you need (as well as the occasional repairman) but it can also be used to purchase cosmetic upgrades for your kitchen.

Negatives:

• The game’s biggest issue is that it has clunky controls. Moving around is awkward, pouring things is awkward, picking up small items is difficult etc. etc. It can get pretty frustrating and while you do kind of get used to it, it doesn’t get any easier to control.
• You have no control over what recipes are active once you’ve unlocked them. If you unlock something that you end up not liking, tough luck. It’s really frustrating that you’re not able to modify your menu, it feels like a pretty significant missing feature.
• Distributing spices on something that’s in more than one piece, is nigh impossible, and it’s so frustrating. If you have six shrimp and you need 10g of salt for the shrimp, good luck. Maybe there’s some way of getting spices evenly distributed in a situation like this, but I certainly haven’t found a way to and it’s so frustrating getting lower scores for this reason.
• The physics are a bit wonky. For example, I’ll often grab something from the fridge and then close the fridge door, but what’s in my hand will somehow get knocked back into the fridge while I’m still holding it, which messes things up a bit. I’ve also broken the ovens several times because I was holding a baking tray as I tried to close the door and the door broke as soon as it touched the baking tray.
• This is minor but bugged me to no end, the way spices show up on the food is awful and makes the food look like it has weird gunk on it all the time. It completely messes up the way some of the food works, I wish the spices were just invisible.

Verdict: