Order Up! is much older than games I usually cover in a review round-up, but I'm doing this one now because it seems to be turning into something of a Wii sleeper hit. Even over two months after its release, I keep hearing people talk about it and the sales seem to be staying rock-solid. Could we have the next Carnival Games on our hands? Even better: could we have a Carnival Games that isn't terrible, and also about cooking, which is a topic I find preferable to carnivals?
It also seems relevant in light of the earlier post today about whether or not Wii games are actually getting any better. Order Up! is the exact sort of game that's been stereotyped to the Wii, a cute family-friendly twitch-oriented experience that ultimately amounts to a mini-game collection with an emphasis on time management. It doesn't even try to offer a lot of intrinsic longevity of replay value. Is that sort of game design doomed to intrinsic badness? With a metacritic average of 76%, the reviews seem to suggest that there are indeed ways to get that sort of thing right.
The high score is, surprisingly, from the GamePro mothership with a 4,25 out of 5. This is fairly unusual, but then again, GamePro reviewers on the whole seem more open to the idea of meat n' potatoes gameplay like this than a lot of other outlets. The ever-awesomely named McKinley Noble finds that Order Up! brilliantly extracts fun gameplay from the not-so-fun world of food service, and really seems to enjoy the waggle-tastic gameplay... though not without a few complaints.
You'll spend most of your time on Port Abello fixing up various dishes for your customers. You use the Wii Remote to slice, flip, and fold ingredients; the real trick is to juggle multiple orders at once, since every meal must be served hot and quick. Being able to simultaneously handle a handful of orders in mere minutes is a rewarding experience, especially when you're tipped well for it. You can also assign certain tasks to your kitchen staff to carry out as well.
The game is a lot of fun, but the minigames that don't involve food, such as dish washing, really pull you out of the core experience. The controls can also be finicky at times -- simple tasks like chopping an onion are easily mastered but more complex actions like tortilla folding can be as difficult as open heart surgery! The game also has charming visuals, but the text is ridiculously small; if you don't have a large TV, you'll literally have your nose to the screen trying to read instructions and recipes.
A slightly lower score comes from WorthPlaying.com, where the game scores an 8 out of 10. Dustin Chadwell compares Order Up! extensively to the Cooking Mama series throughout the course of his review, but he does so very favorably and generally goes out of his way to highlight the differences between the two titles.
That's where your staff of sous chefs will come into play. As you take in orders, which constantly pour in, you need to figure out the components of an order that you should create first. Each order can have up to four different selections, so choosing your early preparations becomes more vital as things get busier. With your sous chefs in play, you can delegate certain tasks to them, leaving you with the more involved aspects of the dish you're trying to create. Using your chefs as a team is essential to creating your food in a timely fashion, and it definitely takes off some of the stress of getting everything done. Sounds a lot like a real kitchen, doesn't it?
The more precise your timing, the more money you'll earn, which you can then use to hire more sous chefs and eventually expand your business. In the beginning, things feel a bit slow, and you'll probably find things pretty repetitive, but as you create more restaurants, you'll gain access to different types of foods and recipes, most of which are grouped according to the theme of the restaurant for which you're preparing food. You'll start of with a basic diner, meaning a lot of fried food, hamburgers, etc., but then you'll work your way up to something more akin to fine dining, and the amount of prep work involved there is completely different from what you start with.
An even slightly lower score comes from MyGamer.com, who awards it a 7.6 out of 10. While generally positive about the gameplay, reviewer Zachary Gasiorowsky seems to find its probably-intentional lack of significant depth or replay value to make the game get tedious more quickly than it necessarily should. His review also brings up Cooking Mama, but compares the title more extensively to Diner Dash while lamenting its lack of multiplayer.
Each dish is immediately given a score as soon as the dish is set in front of the customer. Unfortunately, giving cooking tasks to your hired help will usually result in a lower score, putting more pressure on the player. Managing time, multitasking, and skill play a big part in the success of Order Up. It is a shame that his game is only single player. Instead of hiring computer AI bots that never cook to perfection, I would have gladly let my buddy help with the virtual culinary preparation. And where is the 4 player cookoff option? I guess too many cooks could have spoiled the soup.
The low score comes from the ever-persnickety Nintendo Power, who offered Order Up! a mere 7 out of 10. Despite finding the game generally enjoyable, reviewer Chris Hoffman had issues with some control and interface basics, and criticize the game's basic lack of any real difficulty. Here's the entirety of the game's one-paragraph review.
Remember the movie Ratatouille? With the quirky chefs and the frantic kitchen activity and the evil food critic and the pesky health inspector? Order Up! is a lot like that - only with less lovable vermin. Actually, you do have to eliminate the occasional rodent infestation, as well as clean dishes, hire assistants, buy spices, sharpen knives, and more; it's a complete cooking-game experience. Preparing a variety of dishes via solid, mostly responsive Cooking Mama-style motion-based activities (chopping, slicing, grilling, grating, mashing, stirring, sauteing, and more) is at the heart of Order Up!, but the game takes things a few steps further by letting you cook multiple items simultaneously and implementing a satisfying sense of progression that lets you expand into new restaurants and unlock new recipes as you rake in the cash from customers. It's not particularly challenging (you can't really lose), and there is some repetition as you prepare the same dishes over and over before you expand your menu, but there's plenty to do and it's seasoned with movie-quality voice acting and plenty of quirky charm; the final stage, an Iron Chef-style showdown, is especially amusing. Not everything is perfect, though. Occasionally pop-up windows interfered with my ability to cook, and the back-and-forth slicing motion gave me a lot of trouble, but I still had plenty of fun. Order Up! might not be a five-star restaurant, but it still serves up a hearty meal.
