Imagine this, you enter a cooking competition and one of the demands for the creation of your first dish is cooking with a flaming unicorn. Yes, you read that correctly.. welcome to our review of the Battle-Cooking-Hunting-RPG known as Battle Chef Brigade.
Released on November 20th 2017 by Trinket Studios, the game began as an Kickstarter project back in 2014 and was originally developed for Steam. Luckily Trinket Studios were also licensed to publish and develop on Nintendo and Sony systems, which led to the development for the Nintendo Switch, which isn’t strange as Nintendo is very Indie-friendly. The game looks like a cooking anime, and it feels like a supernatural adaptation to anime/manga series like Shokugeki no Souma (Food Wars).
Gameplay:
The game focusses on Mina and Trash, a human chef with dual knives and Trash, an orc with a taste for BBQ ribs. Both have their own career path and vision on why to partake in the greatest cooking tournament of the nation, in Brigade Town. Mina is stuck in a dead-end job in her family restaurant and wants to break free from those ‘culinary’ chains. Cooking is her life and she wants to make it into a profession – and who wouldn’t? In Brigade Town she meets lots of different cooks, like Trash (the Orc BBQ’er), Ziggy the Undead Necromancing Cook and Kirin the Elvish Science Cook.
The plot of the game revolves mostly around Mina, but will switch between her and Trash, which gives the player a lot of creative freedom. The playstyle of both characters is completely different, so you’ll end up focusing on different elements and ingredients, which keeps the gameplay fresh. The cooking part of the game is a match three variant, and can sometimes be harder than it looks. Another factor that keeps the game refreshing and diverse is the judges that reside over the tournament. Each of the judges prefers a different element, ranging from air, water, earth to fire. The highest scores are received if you create a dish with high level elemental ingredients – so start grinding, within the time limit of course..
Since the game feels like an anime-cooking RPG, the developers gave the player the option to carve out an own path of competitors you want to challenge – each with an own cooking style and equipment. You can buy and upgrade your own equipment to focus on certain styles (like vegetarian or fiery dishes for example). The game isn’t that hard, but offers lots of beautiful cutscenes, a great soundtrack, a decent backstory and side quests and is most off all, loads of fun. These kind of indie games are exactly the types of games you can play on the go, and enjoy with friends as well, since the game even has an online challenge mode.
To conclude: If you are looking for a game to play while watching Master Chef, or to recreate your favorite moments from Shokugeki no Souma? Then Battle Chef Brigade is the game for you. I think everyone should consider playing this gem, since it’s a one in a kind. It has cooking, RPG-elements, match three gameplay, an anime-like story and fits like a glove on the Switch System, so.. what’s no to like? A very deserved 90%! Available now on the Nintedo Switch eShop.
