PEGBRJE: Volo Airsport and Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!
Free falling, and Stressful Food
Volo Airsports is a small gliding and skydiving simulation made by Ramjet Anvil, with credits to Martijn Zandvliet, Frank Versnel, Michael Manning, Xalavier Nelson Jr. and Moldybryd Studio. Players are given a sandbox to play with, complete with skydivers and parachutes, and have no real goal in mind besides falling from the sky and exploring the world around them via their wingsuit.
Players are given a full set of controls and a plethora of starting locations before they jump straight into the action of skydiving. The mouse controls the general movement and tilt, with other inputs to control other actions that players can make such as folding oneself in to fall faster and deploy the parachute. Much of the time spent early on will be getting used to the controls, as 3D freefall movement is dastardly tricky to get the hang of if one is unfamiliar with it. Once the controls are under wraps, however, it becomes this hilarious simulation of falling through the sky, wind blowing rapidly pas as players attempt to stifle their fall so they don’t injure themselves too much on landing. Once they have landed, it’s time to go again and see where the next fall will take them. There’s also a mode to only use the parachute if one feels inclined.
There is VR support for anyone wishing to brave the skies in the virtual landscape, although there are no motion controls. Unfortunately development was halted indefinitely a few years ago; although, Volo Airsports did go open source two months ago, so there may be some mods that others have created. It’s always the possibility with indie development that it becomes unsustainable to continue working on a project, but what Volo Airsports left behind was a solid skydiving simulation. If you want a few minutes in the sky with the ability to repeat if failure occurs, try this one out.
Has anyone ever wanted to run their own restaurant, current climate withstanding? Cook, Serve, Delicious! is back with its second installment allowing players to do just that with Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! made by Vertigo Gaming Inc., an indie studio consisting of David Galindo and Erik Johnson with assistance of various freelancers. Now full disclosure here: I never played the first one. I had heard bits and pieces of it from various friends and game designers alike, but never truly played it nor even looked up what exactly it was besides a cooking game. Worse still is that it was used as a reference for gameplay loops on a game that I worked on, making it even more relevant to my life. So here I am, thankful that the bundle has brought the sequel to me so I can make up for lost time and avoid more excuses. So what exactly is this game, anyway?
If I had to put a label on it, CSD2 is probably the best iteration of a beloved game genre of my childhood: Flash-made speed cooking games(once again, RIP Flash). Players are a chef of the restaurant aptly named Cook, Serve, Delicious! that is unfortunately shut down due to the building owners draining many of the tower’s businesses to avoid declaring bankruptcy. Picking themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps, players start anew in the tallest skyscraper in the city, hoping to bring the CSD empire back from the grave. To recapture this glory, players must rebuild everything from scratch, from the menu to the decor to their own finances. There’s no way to hire any staff right now, so players must decide whether to focus on their own shop and rebuilding its brand or making money as a chef for hire for other restaurants in the building to bolster funds.
Upon deciding where the chef wishes to work for the day, players will be greeted with either the shop they are working for or the CSD shop and will begin cooking for the day. The menus are preset before the day starts, so once the day begins there’s no altering what players can make in order to satisfy the customers, which begin arriving as soon as any prep begins. True to its roots, the core gameplay revolves around time management and precision, where customers will arrive with specific food requests and players will need to create them via button clicks and timers. There are extra slots along the top for food that can be prepped ahead of time or for side dishes to elongate the ‘patience’ metre, so quick decision making is key in order to avoid angry customers walking out. Another key aspect is that there is no trash can; orders that are messed up must be served that way, which leads to perfect combos ruined further adding tension to ensure that every button and keystroke is correct.
To those familiar with the old Flash cooking titles, this all sounds quite familiar, but what sets CSD apart is the sheer amount of extra quality and customization that it brings. For the player’s own CSD restaurant, there are more than 200 food items that can be selected from, each with their own cooking strategy and traits such as how long they take to prep, if they attract more flies than average, or even if they bore customers if on the menu for too long. This gives so much strategy to just picking the three main menu items between how easy one finds them to make in a rush and how well they fit with other foods on the menu. The entire restaurant is also customizable as well, with getting certain thresholds of scores unlocking new items constantly to spice up how the counter or chairs look. There are interchangeable game difficulties and modes, from Classic to Stress (just ruin my life, the difficulty) to Zen (the ‘break please’ difficulty), so players can alter the game based on their current needs. There’s even a co-operative mode to cook with another locally and add to the chaotic fun times even more — and it can somehow be played with a gamepad! How? I have no idea, but they made it work.
This doesn’t even scratch the surface of how huge this title is, from its hundreds of levels to the entire emailing system designed to give backstory and lore to the entire business section of the skyscraper. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is a massive expansion of the concept of speed cooking management titles, and there’s now a third one to top this and if what I’ve been reading is correct, it does so in spades. It’s a game with dozens of hours of content, yet can be played for less than an hour at a time and still feel the satisfaction and excitement that comes with creating food under pressure. If you enjoyed these style of games from the past, CSD2 is absolutely a title to try and enjoy the polish that it brings to the table.
