Developer: Trinket Studios

Publisher: Trinket Studios

Played on: PC

Release Date: November 20, 2017

Played with: Dualshock 4

Paid: $15.73 (Multi-game bundle)

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The popularity of cooking shows is something that I completely understand.  Despite previous discussions around my dislike of cooking, even I can appreciate the artistry that goes into prepping an expertly-crafted dish under a strict time crunch, or the schadenfreude of watching everything fall to pieces.  So what would happen if you took one of TV’s most popular genres and made it so that — rather than simply collecting ingredients from a kitchen — competitors had to go out into the wilds and gather the freshest ingredients themselves?  That’s a question that Battle Chef Brigade seeks to answer, and the result is a damn fine meal of a game.

The story opens by introducing the land of Victusia, a world of monsters and magic, and one supported by the titular brigade of battle chefs.  Mina Han is a young woman who aspires to join their ranks, however doing so requires proving her worth in a tournament against other wannabe battle chefs.  In the background, she’s also contending with an unsupportive family at home, who feel that her expertise is far more valuable working in their restaurant.  Not to be deterred, however, Mina runs away to pursue her dream, entering the tournament and beginning to compete in the hopes of achieving her ultimate goal.

Along the way, Mina meets a cast of colourful characters, including the charismatic orc Thrash, the refined intellectual Kirin, and the rowdy undead wildcard Ziggy.  After some twists and turns in the plot, including tournament conflicts and the reveal of a plague affecting Victusia’s monsters, the four team up to determine the source of the corruption and find a cure.  There’s even a perspective change halfway through, where players take on the role of Thrash to see what he was up to during some critical sections of the plot.  Oddly, though, this section takes place during a time jump backwards that occurs while there are still unresolved conflicts in the main plot.  Things do eventually jump forward again, and Thrash’s story provides additional context for the ultimate villain, but I think it would have been better if these scenes had been interwoven into Mina’s story somehow.  As it is, they feel like more of a disconnect than I would like.  However, it doesn’t change the fact that the narrative overall manages to be a bright, somewhat cozy experience that — while lacking a bit in compelling drama — still kept me coming back for more.

Despite some issues with the storytelling, something that consistently shines in Battle Chef Brigade is the presentation.  Throughout all of these events, solid voice acting brings each character to life, and the game’s vibrant art style that looks straight out of a modern anime series certainly doesn’t hurt.  Every dish is brought to life with delectable detail that brings to mind the mouthwatering visuals of Studio Ghibli films, and even minor characters get unique designs and a few voice lines at minimum when you talk to them, bringing some much-appreciated depth to the world.  Special mention should go to Tom Taylorson’s role as Kamin, who introduces each round of the tournament with roaring aplomb.  Meanwhile, animations can come across as a bit choppy due to a lack of frames, but they generally succeed in feeling more stylized than stilted.  Lastly, while there’s not a ton of variety in the soundtrack, what is there manages to be pleasant to listen to while doing the game’s various tasks, and I never found myself feeling like I needed to mute it or introduce my own score.

Pretty visuals and fun voice acting don’t mean much when it comes to gameplay, though.  Well, they certainly don’t hurt, but you get the idea.  Luckily, this is another area in which Battle Chef Brigade excels.  Each round of the tournament is split into two aspects that have to be balanced in real time to succeed: gathering ingredients and cooking dishes.  The former involves going out into the wilds to hunt monsters and pick plants using a pretty straightforward side-scrolling beat-em-up type system.  Characters have both basic and magic attacks (the latter of which use a mana bar that slowly recharges over time), and it’s possible to combo your moves together to take down your foes more efficiently.  Slain monsters and attacked plants will drop ingredients that you can pick up (assuming you have space in your satchel) and carry back to your kitchen to stock it for the match.  However, you want to be careful: monsters can eat ingredients that you leave on the ground, and if you take too much damage, you’ll drop everything you have and respawn in the kitchen, usually resulting in a frantic runback before your hard-won ingredients are consumed.  Overall, the combat is surprisingly addictive, and I found myself working on things like dodge timings and combo attacks so I could become a more effective supply-gathering machine.

Once you’ve collected all you need, though, it’s time to cook.  While it is possible to do last-minute supply runs after you’ve started cooking (and some cookware will incentivize it), I tended towards gathering everything I needed and only going back out if things went horribly wrong.  The cooking takes the form of a gem matching minigame in the vein of something like Bejeweled: each ingredient provides some variety of green, red, and blue gems of different levels, and your goal is to rotate them around in your pots to make matches.  Matches upgrade the gem to a higher tier (to a max of 3), thematically boosting that flavour’s profile in your dish.

The catch is that you don’t necessarily want to match everything.  Each judge in the tournament round has a preference for one or more of the three flavours of gems, which forces you to prioritize the high tiers of those gems in your dish at the expense of others.  This is fairly straightforward when a judge is just interested in one particular flavour, but when they want you to balance two (or even all three) flavours in a dish, the cooking process quickly becomes far trickier and more delicate. To make matters more complicated, each round also has a feature ingredient that must be included in the dish unless you want a heavy point penalty. At the outset this is easy enough to work with, but soon the feature ingredients start providing strong gems that don’t always jive with the judges’ tastes, meaning you have to find ways to incorporate them while simultaneously masking their undesirable flavours.

More wrinkles get added once the monster plague kicks into high gear, as it becomes not uncommon to find ingredients with fragile gems that break after a few moves, as well as bones that are useless unless you match 3 to make a wild gem that can match anything.  Plus, some ingredients contain poison which explodes after a few movements, making all surrounding gems fragile.  It can be matched to upgrade gems, but the limited actions you have to do so means you have to be careful and plan ahead with how you’re initially arranging ingredients in your pot, lest you end up with poison that’s impossible to deal with safely. The judges also dock points from your dish if any poison is left over, often scolding you for your obvious attempt at assassination.  These extra twists take Battle Chef Brigade’s cooking competitions from something that was addictive, albeit simplistic early on to something that left me exhausted after each match, often running right up against the time limit while frantically plating my concoctions.

There is one problem with all these requirements in matches, and that’s that you don’t learn them ahead of time.  This wouldn’t necessarily be a concern, except Battle Chef Brigade places an emphasis on customizing your cooking loadout to optimize your effectiveness in each match.  Different pots provide special abilities like repairing fragile gems, slowly upgrading gems, or allowing you to make matches with only two gems of a specific colour.  Ingredients can be brought in that provide you with some starting gems or sauces to tweak dishes, and expertise books give point bonuses to your dishes if you fulfill certain requirements.  Lastly, your combat supplies can be swapped out to give you more health, storage space, and so on.

This system seems tailor-made for creating specialized loadouts for each match, yet the complete lack of info prior to beginning each one means more emphasis is placed on generalization, at least for the first attempt.  Since the match requirements don’t change on retries, I often found myself going in with a jack-of-all-trades loadout, losing, and then retrying with one that was actually designed to succeed.  It’s a weird system; there’s even an achievement for never losing a match in the campaign, and I feel like the only way to get it would be to look up all the match requirements online in advance of each challenge.  That’s a real bummer for a game that has so much room for player strategizing in its mechanisms.

Outside of the matches, you can earn money in town taking on jobs for three different residents.  You have unlimited time to solve gem-matching puzzles in Belchior’s cat-filled laboratory, while at Thorn’s hunting trophy-encrusted residence, monster hunts are the name of the game, usually centring around completing specific kills or practicing new combat mechanisms.  Finally, at Pontida’s busy kitchen, you have to match gem patterns under a time crunch.  At first when Battle Chef Brigade introduced these side hustles, I was a bit put off, as it seemed like they were just reiterating things that I went through in the tutorial.  However, it soon became clear they were helping to crystallize earlier concepts that I had forgotten or misunderstood due to the amount of up-front information covered in the game’s tutorial.  It also helps that each job ramps up in challenge as the game progresses, with Belchior’s puzzles in particular becoming quite satisfying head-scratchers by the end.

Succeeding at all these jobs rewards you with money, which can be spent on items for your character’s loadout.  I was surprised that Battle Chef Brigade isn’t a game in which you can just buy everything by the end; even after completing every job on every day of the tournament, I was still lacking the funds to acquire several items.  That ended up being a nice change-up, though, as it made every purchase feel meaningful; I constantly wanted to make sure I was buying things I’d actually use, rather than haphazardly purchasing everything because it was there.

Aside from the main story mode, Battle Chef Brigade also features local multiplayer, a challenge mode, and daily cook-offs.  I only tested the latter for this review, but it’s an interesting challenge where you receive a hodgepodge of items and judge requirements each day and must attempt to do your best with them.  I probably won’t return to it consistently, but it’s a great way to add variety for those that want to keep coming back.  Interestingly, Ziggy is a playable character in these modes, despite not being one in the main campaign; if anything, I do feel compelled to explore a bit more just to see how his moveset differs from the others.

Battle Chef Brigade is an exciting action puzzle game that was a joy to play from start to finish.  I found that it worked well both as a game to play in longer sessions, as well as in more bite-sized periods where I’d just complete a day or two of matches and then call it good.  It’s not marketed as a cozy game, likely due to the intensity of its competition segments, yet I nonetheless got a cozy vibe from the plot, aesthetics, and delightful characters.  It’s not without its flaws, but I nonetheless highly recommend it, especially if you’re a puzzle game and anime fan.  In fact, I could totally see it getting an anime adaptation at some point, and I would watch that in a heartbeat.  In short, Battle Chef Brigade is an exquisitely presented, wonderfully flavoured dish, and one that you’ll probably want to return to for seconds.

9/10