Game: Cannibal Cuisine
Genre: 3D, Arcade, Party
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Steam)
Developer|Publisher: Rocket Vulture
Age Rating: EU 16+ | US Teen
Price: UK £11.69 | EU 12,99 | AU $19.50 | CA $17.19 | US $12.99
Release Date: 20th May 2020
Review code provided with many thanks to Rocket Vulture
Co-op Cooking
One of the best co-op games I have shared with my wife is a cute little cooking game called Overcooked. A brilliant title that we played excessively, so much so that we tried to 3 star every level. It holds a very special place in my gaming heart as it created wonderful memories and was so much fun to play with others. There really isn’t a lot of games like Overcooked out there (except its sequel of course). Cannibal Cuisine is a game that tries to take inspiration from Overcooked but with its own spin on the co-op cooking formula. But is it enough to take on the kitchen?

See you on the Island
Things have gone array on Cannibal Island. Hoochooboo, large black tar monsters with big mouths and big appetites have started appearing round the island and demand to be fed. It’s up to you and the natives to appease these nasty beings until their hunger is satisfied. You have to create dishes over a fire which consist of fruit, vegetables and of course human body parts.
The icons of what you’re cooking on the fire are quite small. It was not uncommon to loose track what was being cooked. You can let dishes made by mistake burn and they disappear completely but this wastes valuable time. Once cooked you need to serve them to the hungry monster and obtain enough points to get a star rating up to three. You need at least one star to progress in the game. All this is under the constraints of a time limit as well as the various hazards in each level.

The body parts are obtained by killing tourists. They won’t go down easy though as they fight back and are pretty tough too. You can choose some character abilities at the start of each level like dash or stomp to help you pick the right strategy to get through the level. The general design of each level is similar, just with new hazards to work with. At the end of five levels you play a challenge level which sort of acts as a boss level this can involve killing waves of tourists or avoiding traps. I actually had more fun playing these challenge levels than the cooking levels and it’s a shame there are so few of them.

You’ll Float Too
The controls are floaty and awkward. Your native character moves far too fast and often jerky, making it hard to follow them on the map. Right from the first level there are water traps which are far too easy to fall into. When this happens you loose points towards your target goal, which you have to attain for yourself. You just seem to move too fast round the map, most of the mistakes I made felt like they were due to fighting the controls as opposed to accidents. With the games time limit per level this just added to more stress and frustration. Even more so when you’re not even able to pause the game, you can bring up a menu but the timer continues on in the background which makes the process mute.

Bizarre Difficulty Spikes
The difficulty feels like it’s set far too high for this game. When I played the demo on PC the one start level was set suitably to allow for sufficient margin of error so you could at least complete the level. This design usually makes sense in general for games, then make the three star rating harder to obtain and requiring multiple playthroughs to master. In the Switch release the one star goal is set far too high in each level, especially in co-op. We often found that we had to restart levels over and over out of sheer frustration as we had failed orders, fallen of the map or the games random elements just generally did not agree with us. What’s worse is the gap between earning one and two stars is really small meaning often we would earn zero stars or two. You have to obtain at least one star to progress in the game so often we walked away from play sessions in rage.

Due to this difficulty and the games general performance issues we struggled to progress in co-op. Particularly since you need to earn more points to earn a single star, the more players you have playing the game. By playing in single player I managed to scrape through the game. But it felt like a grindy experience and I had zero intention of returning to 3 star any of the levels. The game also has a versus mode, we tried this but due to all the issues mentioned above we failed to have much fun with it.

Cute Cannibals
Graphics are simple and kinda cute. It even feels like cute violence when you’re native attacking the tourists. You can customize your native with various hats, weapons, colour and by choosing a special skill. Creating your ideal adorable killer chef. The levels are colourful and you’ll play across your typical island environments like a temple area, volcano area and sandy beach. Each with their own hazards and themes. The music is a single track of drum beats which loops over and over on every level and gets old pretty quick. So in go the earphones to listen to Stand By Me by Ki: Theory instead. Which is a really odd cover of a famous song that kinda grows on you. Sorry, I got distracted there.

The Final Course
Cannibal Cuisine has all the right ingredients to be a fun cooking game to play alone or with co-op buddies. But it just hasn’t come together well and feels more like a burned meal than something created with care and attention. Floaty controls, silly difficulty spikes, targets and utterly horrendous random elements in the game will make you want to close the kitchen and never return. It’s just not fun. With patching I think there is still hope for this game and it could still be something worth dipping into. Currently I suggest getting your co-op fix elsewhere.
Final Verdict: I’m not sure
Review Update:
Three days after the game launched a patch was issued to address some performance issues on stage 1-3. Upon further investigation and revisiting the game solo and in co-op, some of my critiques above have been addressed. For starters the initial star barrier has been reduced for all levels. So the game has gone from being very hard to get a single star to progress, to being manageable. The game feels less floaty to control and runs a little slower. The frustration with water hazards was still present. Random elements like tourists not dropping the right meat and bombs just not spawning to destroy walls in later levels are also still present. The patches have made the game much more playable and I have adjusted my score accordingly from I don’t like it to I’m not sure.