Mixing time management, skilled typing (when using a keyboard, at least), and memorization in a somewhat odd way, what comes out of the oven isn’t quite like anything else on the market. Serving as somebody that appears to be both the proprietor and/or sole employee of a variety of restaurants, you are tasked with handling food and chore orders as they stream in. The most obvious goal (besides survival) is scoring a perfect day by getting every order exactly right, and if you really want to over-achieve you can go for getting a Delicious on every order by having perfect orders paired with optional “side dishes”.

CSD 2 is a straight improvement over the original by this point. There is more complexity without it all feeling overwhelming, even if some of the themed restaurants can end up being stressful enough that you can’t help but let out a long sigh of relief when you hear the final whistle blow. Foods range from fire-and-forget button presses to elaborate affairs of 6 or more steps, the themed restaurants scale up in difficulty as you continue pursuing their chains, and there’s been a steady trickle of content both to keep things from getting too stale and to deliver on what the community has been asking for. If it all becomes too much for you, you can get a local friend in on the action to help keep the workload down.

Now for the caveats. This is definitely a game that will ask a lot of you when it comes to dexterity if you want to become really accomplished, and I still don’t like how multiple pages of a recipe can have the same key press do different things. Still, when you’re on a hot streak, you can really feel it, which makes breaking your combo feel even more disappointing; With the exception of a few foods, it’s always very clear that user input errors were the source of this disappointment, but for the most part the game doesn’t do much to incentivize you to seek out additional challenge without going for it yourself. That detail’s not a problem for me, but it might be for some people.

Mixing time management, skilled typing (when using a keyboard, at least), and memorization in a somewhat odd way, what comes out of the oven isn’t quite like anything else on the market. Serving as somebody that appears to be both the proprietor and/or sole employee of a variety of restaurants, you are tasked with handling food and chore orders as they stream in. The most obvious goal (besides survival) is scoring a perfect day by getting every order exactly right, and if you really want to over-achieve you can go for getting a Delicious on every order by having perfect orders paired with optional “side dishes”. CSD 2 is a straight improvement over the original by this point. There is more complexity without it all feeling overwhelming, even if some of the themed restaurants can end up being stressful enough that you can’t help but let out a long sigh of relief when you hear the final whistle blow. Foods range from fire-and-forget button presses to elaborate affairs of 6 or more steps, the themed restaurants scale up in difficulty as you continue pursuing their chains, and there’s been a steady trickle of content both to keep things from getting too stale and to deliver on what the community has been asking for. If it all becomes too much for you, you can get a local friend in on the action to help keep the workload down. Now for the caveats. This is definitely a game that will ask a lot of you when it comes to dexterity if you want to become really accomplished, and I still don’t like how multiple pages of a recipe can have the same key press do different things. Still, when you’re on a hot streak, you can really feel it, which makes breaking your combo feel even more disappointing; With the exception of a few foods, it’s always very clear that user input errors were the source of this disappointment, but for the most part the game doesn’t do much to incentivize you to seek out additional challenge without going for it yourself. That detail’s not a problem for me, but it might be for some people.