Overview
In contrast to most party games, such as Overcooked. Plate Up isn’t about completing a series of puzzle-like stages. Instead, it tasks you and your friends with running a procedural run-based restaurant where failure means starting over, hopefully with a more successful business plan.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
You have a decent amount of control over your restaurant, including what dishes to offer and where to place all of your stations and equipment. You have to find efficient ways to cook your meals while tending to your guests in a timely manner. The longer you survive, the more challenges and curve balls get thrown your way.
| Gideon’s Bias | Plate Up Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Yogcast Games |
| Hours Played: 10+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, Xbox Series Consoles, PlayStation 4/5 & Nintendo Switch |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Co-op Roguelite Party Game |
| Mode Played: N/A | Price: $19.99 |
Let Them Cook
Plate Up takes the phrase “The customer is always right” to an extreme level. If a single patron leaves your restaurant because they waited too long, you get shut down. Plate Up is a balancing act of ensuring your patrons can be seated, taking their orders, cooking the dishes, delivering said orders, and then cleaning up after them.
Delivering meals earns you money, which can be spent on randomized stations and gear between days. If you fail, you start over, but with access to new layouts and dishes, you can prepare.
Every few days you have to choose between a couple of curve balls that increase the challenge, but also the amount of XP you earn. Maybe it’s simply a new dish, or perhaps your guests gain the ability to change their order halfway through.
Plate Up can be a real challenge. The thing that sets it apart from most party games is the amount of control you have over tackling that challenge. You choose the dishes, you place your stations, and you form a game plan of how to efficiently tackle each day.
For example, my partner and I often opted for an additional space between the kitchen and dining hall instead of a door. This meant one person was locked into kitchen duty, and the other to the dining hall. But it gave us an extra space to pass meals and dishes between us.
For some runs, we decided we needed a better way to wash dishes. For other runs we opted for a hosting table for patrons to wait at, but at the cost of having to seat them manually.
In Co-op, teamwork and communication are paramount. The person working the kitchen rarely had time to actually look at the patron’s orders and had to rely on the player waiting on them to bark out which orders they wanted first.
There were times when we ran like a well-oiled machine and that felt great. There were other times when one of us would panic and say something stupid like, “One salad, no lettuce” which is absolutely not a thing. It caused a downward spiral of mayhem when I unquestionably put a plate with just cut tomatoes on the counter.
The beauty of it is, the game was fun either way. Whether it’s pure chaos as my partner and I slung insults at each other, or when we ran the kitchen with enough grace to make Gordan Ramsay proud.
Variety, Spice, Life
Every run in Plate Up is decently varied. Every dish has a unique way of putting it together, and the random curve balls that show up every few days keep things spicy. The upgrades you can obtain do have a drastic difference with how you approach each challenge, and you have to make difficult choices on what to prioritize.
That said. Plate Up tends to flounder a bit in the replayability department compared to most rogue-lite games. You get the occasional bonus to take into a run, but there isn’t a lot of meta progression. You just unlock new floor plans and dishes as you level up.
The thing is, its random nature can be as much of a curse as a blessing. There have been several runs where I was bored to tears for the first half of a run. I knew the exact process I needed to throw something, like pizza for example, out faster than I needed to. Then suddenly, just the right curveball would put an anti-climatic end to an otherwise uneventful run.
There is also some pretty cool ways you could, theoretically automate some processes. There are cool gadgets like auto combiners and conveyor belts. However, since it’s all random, I never got the right combination of automation stations to make it happen in my 10 hours of gameplay.
Plate Up is at its best when the challenge is a gradual climb to keep you engaged. But it’s often full of peaks and valleys. The start of a run is often mindlessly easy. Whether or not it ends up being a satisfying challenge or a sudden scramble to save your restaurant is a complete dice roll.
Verdict
Plate Up is the type of game I always hoped would spawn from the likes of Overcooked. I simply enjoy replayable sandboxes more than one-and-done style games. Co-op rogue-lites are also something of a rarity, so Plate Up was right up my alley.
For the most part, I found it enjoyable. Coming up with your own way to cooperatively and efficiently run an Overcooked style restaurant is a ton of fun, and each dish poses its own challenges.
That said, the game just isn’t as replayable as I would like. Additionally, while a strong challenge is one of the things I value most in a video game. The challenge has to be consistent. In Plate Up, I often find myself bored and just going through the motions for long periods of time, only to be blindsided randomly with a huge difficulty spike.
Plate Up was certainly a fun experience and I enjoyed unlocking each new dish. But in an ironic twist of fate. Despite being a rogue-lite game I ended up putting a similar amount of time in Plate Up as I did Overcooked, a game I criticized for being too short.
