Overcooked: The Lost Morsel (PlayStation 4) Review

Overcooked is a chaotically fun local multiplayer game that provides the opportunity for up to four friends to reinforce the old adage that too many cooks do indeed spoil the broth. For those foolhardy souls that were skilled enough to make it through the main campaign and emerge at the other end unscathed, then for just over the price of a Happy Meal there is The Lost Morsel. Here, the jobbing food technicians head out to the leafy jungle to prep and serve culinary magic in six brand new kitchens that are so far off the beaten track they can only be reached by helicopter.

One of Overcooked's strengths was the fact that it remained constantly inventive and had enough fresh ideas on a level to level basis that it was able to avoid any obvious repetition - an admirable trait that has, thankfully, continued into the DLC. On the menu this time around are pizzas, which are straightforward enough, and the slightly more labour intensive chicken or beef burritos. These dishes require some rapid switching between frying pans for meat and saucepans for rice. With limited hobs, that's actually a lot harder than it sounds. The majority of the kitchens are divided into two halves with a design in mind of keeping both chefs separated, forcing a reliance on good communication, if well organised team play is the aim.

Expect such kitchen obstacles as player-operated counter switches that open up certain areas while closing off others, and hobs on rails where one of the hobs has to be rolled off screen to access the other. Not to mention one particularly treacherous kitchen that has two sporadic streams of fireballs that just so happen to run along a busy serving/washing up corridor. Managing recipe preparation while dodging these obstacles is key to succeeding in each stage.

It starts getting particularly tricky when each chef has to rely on their partner to stand on floor pressure pads that operate doors on the opposite side of the kitchen, meaning that they have to take turns to perform each stage of the preparation process. Cookery isn't supposed to make the head hurt this much. The final level is ridiculously tough, as each workstation will very suddenly relocate to another part of the kitchen — sometimes midway through chopping up ingredients — frequently leading to some very confused chefs.