Did you know that not adding olives to a salad can shut down an entire restaurant? In Plate Up it is possible. This co-op cafe management game has no time for those who can’t take orders. If you make a mistake, no matter how small, it can be enough to close a restaurant. So if you want to run a successful business, you better be a quick thinker with a solid team around you. Two things I unfortunately don’t own.
When you watch Plate Up for the first time, you go straight to Overcooked. While the premise of cooking, serving and collaborating is the same, this is not a clone. Instead of taking orders, here you take charge, choose the restaurant layout and menu, and work your way through 15 days of restaurant management with up to four players. After each day, your profit can be spent on additional items or upgrades for your kitchen, and you can also customize every element of the experience. This means you can’t blame the game if you discover the sink is too far from the serving hatch. Any layout disaster is entirely your own fault, as is the burnt steak and the wrong order.
The roguelite elements that make this stand out can also thwart you if you don’t have what it takes to keep up. You combine different layouts and menus to create unique restaurants that you then have to run. Roguelite elements come in the form of a large closed board. New layouts and menu items are activated every five days and will remain unlocked once the milestone is reached. However, restaurant upgrades, layout changes, and additions are as temporary as the salad you’re about to chop. If you don’t please your customers, get ready for the culinary equivalent of “you died” as your restaurant is unceremoniously closed and you’re going back to day one. Failure is all part of Plate Up’s appeal.
Solo play is designed to be easier than multiplayer, but the kitchen layouts make the challenge very real. There’s also an element of ragdoll physics to the game that will have your little chef hitting the kitchen doors more often than you think they should. Playing with different combinations of players, I found that three turned out to be the optimal number. One person to cook and place orders, one to wash the dishes and floors, and another to take and deliver orders. Adding a fourth person increased the difficulty more than the extra pair of hands helped. Though this may have to do with the fact that the pair of hands in question belongs to a twelve-year-old boy who is a master at being busy when he doesn’t feel like doing anything.
In later levels, research is unlocked and kitchen automation enters the fray. This takes some of the pressure off, but also adds new things to manage and track. The early game is pure survival. You need a solid plan and a team that really does what you ask of them. However, be prepared to find that your plan fails and you need a new plan. The difficulty will eat you up and spit you out faster than a customer who found onions they didn’t want in their food.
Plate Up has a strong focus on strategy, difficulty and customization. These elements are clearly what the main gameplay is all about. The graphics are cute but simple, providing an experience that’s not obnoxious, but not incredibly eye-catching either. I was a little skeptical at first because it feels a little low budget, but you soon realize there’s a reason for it.
The images are usually practical and functional so you can identify items you need without drawing your attention. However, there are some areas where they could use improvement. This is usually linked to being able to identify specific food items and you will notice it very early on when cooking steak. Restaurants that only serve steak are your first challenge and you can cook the meat up to three times, changing the color each time it goes through rare, medium and well done. It was difficult at first to match the steak color to the customer’s order and it took some getting used to. If you’re having trouble with color perception or color depth settings on your TV or monitor, this can be its own challenge.
Plate Up feels like a divisive game. When starting out, I didn’t expect such a high level of difficulty. I even took the extra time to write this review because I wanted to explore more of the later game and it took much longer to get there than I expected and there is a lot more that I just haven’t been able to get to yet due to a lack to craftsmanship on my part. I also played multiplayer with my teens and the one who likes a challenge enjoyed it much more than the other who just got frustrated. If you are not ready to invest a serious amount of time mastering the intricacies of fulfilling orders quickly and efficiently, then Plate Up is not for you. Having to reboot completely if you fail after day three can get old very quickly and getting all the way to day 15 requires a skill that more casual players like me are likely to struggle with.
I found the difficulty in many places brutal. I had to rely a lot on the help of my teen who likes more challenging games. It really forced us to collaborate, plan, adapt and communicate right away. Without it, I think we would have given up much sooner. In fact, the other kids gave up pretty quickly. If you’re looking for a quick, fun and easy time, Plate Up just isn’t for you. It really is a next-level experience with a layer of strategy and planning that goes much deeper than most games of this type.
The adaptable kitchen requires you to think carefully about layout and upgrades. If you don’t buy an extra table early enough, you may run out of room for all the customers you need to serve, but unless you have the infrastructure to handle the orders, you’ll be overrun if you expand too quickly. Everything is a balancing act. This also applies to various benefits that you unlock. At certain points you get the choice of perks, but they are not as cheap as you would expect. For example, you can get more experience with a “photographic memory” perk, but you’ll need to remember orders and only see visual prompts if someone is close to the customer ordering. Likewise, an upgrade to your speed can leave you mud behind, meaning your advantage can slow others down.
Overall, Plate Up is a unique restaurant management experience, mixing roguelike elements in the genre in a way I’ve never seen before. It requires a sharp mind, good planning skills, excellent communication and tenacity. All of which I don’t have. Fortunately, the game also lets you practice new recipes by feeding cats. It was the perfect way to work on my skills while wondering if these cats ever get full.
Score: 3.5/5. The publisher has provided a review code for PC.
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