Restaurant sim Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is uprooting itself and leaving the regular restaurant business behind, giving players a customisable armoured food truck to drive across what remains of war-torn America. Even the post-apocalyptic dystopia of 2042 deserves good grub.
Turning your cooking management game into an sci-fi road trip is certainly one way to avoid stagnation. Creator David Galindo wanted to do something dramatically different for the third game, and it goes well beyond the setting.
With your restaurant on the road, old mechanics have been flung out, like chores and side dishes, and instead you'll be dealing with aggressive competitors and rushing through your orders before you hit the next stop, injecting a bit of action and a brisker pace. If you don't fancy the stress, there's a more relaxing Zen campaign, too.
The campaign, singleplayer and co-op, is more story-driven than its predecessors, complete with cutscenes and a crew of chatty robots. The purpose of the road trip is to get to the new US capital of Nashville in a race to decide the Iron Cook Food Truck champion and best chef in the world. The journey sounds like it will be a long one, though, with hundreds of levels and hundreds of dishes.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! will be at PAX West 2019, which starts on August 30, and is due out in Steam Early Access in January 2020.