Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together Review: The Magic Is Gone
Seven years of waiting, multiple delays, and an entire engine overhaul. You would think the sequel to one of the most beloved sandbox games on Steam would arrive polished and ready for service.
Instead, Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together serves up a raw, buggy, and ultimately soulless experience. The developers at Big Cheese Studio made a massive fundamental shift in their design philosophy. They looked at the chaotic, physics driven hilarity of the first game, including the flying tomatoes and the exploding microwaves, and decided to strip it all away in favor of hyper realistic line cook management.
If you have worked in a real kitchen, you might appreciate the underlying logic of prepping ingredients and storing them for the next day. But as a video game? It is just not fun. It feels less like a sandbox and more like clocking into a stressful, poorly optimized shift at a struggling diner.
The Death Of Free Cutting And Physics
The most controversial change in Cooking Simulator 2 is the complete removal of free cutting and physics based pouring.
In the original game, trying to slice a lemon felt like disarming a bomb. It was janky and frustrating, but it was incredibly fun because it required actual skill and precision. In the sequel, that entire system has been replaced by an automated, grid based clicking mechanic. You put an onion on a board, click the dice option, and watch the game perfectly separate it into neat little piles.
A Sterilized Kitchen
The food no longer rolls off the counter if you bump into it. Everything you place down becomes rigidly static unless you specifically use the throw button. The developers actively sterilized the kitchen. Sure, it is infinitely more efficient, but it completely removes the tactile joy of preparing food. You are no longer cooking. You are just clicking through a spreadsheet of ingredients.
Strict Plating And Floating Food
The plating system is just as disappointing. The game demands extreme precision, completely robbing you of any creative freedom when assembling a dish. To make matters worse, the physics engine cannot even handle this new strict system. Players are constantly reporting bugs where sauces stretch like elastic bands and ingredients bizarrely float above the plates.
A Technical Nightmare
Even if you can accept the new, rigid mechanics, you have to survive the horrific optimization.
The game runs terribly across the board. Even with a high end RTX 40 series cards I get massive micro stuttering, harsh frame drops, and constant freezing. The lighting is blindingly bright even with the kitchen lights turned off, and there are virtually no graphics settings to adjust the frame rate or sensitivity.
UI And Accessibility Failures
The user interface is a total disaster. Navigating the recipe tablet requires endless scrolling through tiny, illegible icons. More unforgivably, basic accessibility features are completely broken. If you try to rebind your keyboard layout, the game simply ignores your inputs and defaults back to the original bindings. For disabled gamers who rely on custom controls, the game is literally unplayable right out of the box.
The Management Grind
If you try to play this game solo, you will lose your mind to boredom. The pacing is absolutely glacial.
Slow Customers And Insane Wait Times
You will spend minutes just standing around an empty dining room waiting for a poorly animated NPC to finally decide what they want to eat. You prep the meal in a few minutes, and then you are back to standing around waiting. The game also expects you to wait thirty real life minutes for certain ingredient deliveries. Putting mobile game wait timers into a premium PC release is a baffling decision.
The Broken Tutorial And Recipe Editor
The progression system is just as flawed. The tutorial is a confusing, text heavy mess that manages to completely bankrupt you before the actual campaign even starts. It asks you to mix ingredients but refuses to give you the tool required to do so. If you try to engage with the highly advertised recipe creator, you are met with a convoluted menu system that lacks any meaningful in game guide to explain how it works.
Better Together? Barely.
The entire marketing hook of this sequel is the co-op mode. Better Together is literally in the title.
When the multiplayer actually works, it is the only time the game shows flashes of brilliance. Coordinating prep stations and shouting orders across the kitchen with a friend adds a layer of communication that the first game lacked. However, getting it to work is a massive headache.
Desync And Matchmaking Issues
Random matchmaking results in instant kicks with zero explanation. Lobbies constantly crash. When you actually get into a kitchen with someone else, the desync issues tear the reality of the game apart. Your co-op partner might see a completely raw steak while you see a burnt one. If someone else is using the plating station, you are completely locked out of it, forcing you to just stand there and watch them work.
The Verdict
Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together has flashes of a deep, highly structured restaurant management game hidden underneath a mountain of bugs and awful design choices. But my honest opinion? It is just not fun to play. The developers ripped out the chaotic heart of the franchise to build a realistic kitchen, but forgot to make sure the new systems were actually enjoyable. Unless you are desperate for a co-op management grind and are willing to wait for a dozen performance patches, stick to the first game.
Score: 4.5 / 10 A raw, buggy sequel that proves hyper-realism and broken menus are a terrible recipe.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.
