Battle Chef Brigade (2017)

Playing the demo, that allows you to go for the daily cook-off chalenges. It is simply addicting. The game concept is innovative. The gameplay at a first look may seem dull or uninspired, but it is actually very dense, varied and complex. The company behind these game should get a multimillion budget for any project they have. Innovative and well idealized ideas like this game should be always, ALWAYS supoorted, financed and the word-of-mouth spreaded. I am truly amazed!

A combination of lite brawling and match-3 drop puzzle mechanics, this game took me completely by surprise. I'm not usually a fan of either genre but I tore through this game with a monstrous hunger, and as this is a game where you hunt monsters for specific ingredients to cook with that pun was absolutely intended. Gameplay is simple. Using basic brawling mechanics you hunt monsters for ingredients to bring back to your kitchen and in the kitchen you use match-3 mechanics to make different cooking dishes. I think what makes this game work for me mechanically is that all the brawling and puzzling has a purpose. You are hunting specific monsters. You are not just matching 3, but matching them in such a way as to create a specific "flavor crystal" combination. And all of it is wrapped up in a light and buttery story with art and characters heavily inspired by shonen manga and manwha. Even if you are not generally a fan of these genres you might want to give this Fantasy Iron Chef game a try.

Barring the one chapter of the story that felt like filler, this was surprisingly good. The main mechanic of the game is like a cross between match-3 and tetris, but with action-platformer style monster-hunting to get ingredients to drop into your pot to match and stir into higher-level ingredients to get a higher-level finished dish to present in competition. The characters were way more interesting than I thought they'd become in a game like this. I like that you can go back and practise at any point if you add a new mechanic (like matching 4 instead of three to jump two levels...or pots that can match with only two, but with only one element, and etc) and aren't confident in how to use it smoothly during cook-offs. I was rushing this to get to Dragon Quest Builders, but it was actually really good.