PixlBit

You know what is interesting about the wii? What's interesting is that it got so many restaurant style cooking simulators. I'm not just talking the Cooking Mama series... of which 2 such titles and a babysitting simulator came for the Nintendo's motion control monster. I'm talking titles like Dinner Dash! or Fast Food Panic. Today we have a cooking simulator mixed with a restaurant manager. Today we have Order Up! A game a bought for just $3. It also came with a cheap chef's hat. So, let's put on our hats everyone and let's get cooking!

 Order Up! puts gamers in the role of a short order cook who works his (or her) way up through the ranks of Dingy Diner owner to full-fledged high ritz fancy restaurant with French sounding name in the small island community of Port Abello which par for the course of this game has restaurants with just as many play on words as the island itself.(GET IT! IT'S PORTABELLO! Like the mushroom! HEH? HEH!? *RIMSHOT*). During the course of the game, the gamer will work at a fast food chain for a day (Burger Face) which is essentially the most interesting tutorial I've played based on the cinematics alone at the end you work so hard to owe them money... I admit I chuckled.  There's also the aforementioned dingy diner (The Gravy Chug Diner), a Mexican restaurant (El Fuego), an Italian eatery (Stuffolinis), and finally the fancy French restaurant on a high rise (Chez Haute).

Each restaurant requires you to do the following: managing the staff, preparing the dishes, and even at times washing the dishes. At first, you'll perform  almost all of the food preparation and cleanup duties yourself. However, as you accumulate more stars for your rating and money, more and more paying customers arrive with cash, simultaneously affording you the ability to hire staff  and automate the kitchen duties as well as buying better or more equipment.

The motion controls are mostly accurate. You use simple gestures to simulate chopping vegetables, grating cheese, and shredding lettuce. At least I can sat the motions do not consist of swinging the Wii Remote around wildly like a mad man. Instead, I was surprised by the deliberate ways to make the most efficient use of time in getting the order to the customer quickly and to their specifications.

The overall visual theme is cartoony and stylized, Order Up! is definitely one of the more interesting looking titles on the Wii. The character animations are a bit bland, and the backgrounds are static almost to a point where you don't notice, but the visuals definitely have a unique appeal and seldom seem boring or dull. I can't explain it...maybe it's supposed to be that way? After all the characters are simply drawn without too much detail or depth... why do it for everything everything else? It's deliberately cartoon looking.

Order Up! won't win any points for the background music (If it had any I couldn't tell). The game features a good deal of voice acting which has a few lines repeated a bit too often if you stick with certain chefs, but it's the lack of real music that I found disappointing. At least a Burger Face theme song would have been interesting!

Order Up! is not entirely simple, and it will definitely keep you hooked for quite some time. When the game begins adding resource management tasks like ordering specialty ingredients, health inspectors come to shut you down, or impressing the food critic, the seemingly simple task of managing a restaurant grows increasingly more complex.

Although Order Up! does not support multiplayer, it does lend itself to party style play allowing families and friends to pass the controller around... though I'm a bit  disappointed in that aspect... afterall Cooking Mama: Cook Off! had a 2 player option and that came out before this game.... I think it was around launch time too... or a little after that. Still that's a whole year and a half before Order Up! was released. Again I have to say this...IF YOUR GAME HAS FUN MULTIPLAYER ELEMENTS AND PARTY STYLE GAMEPLAY... INCLUDE A 2ND CONTROLLER!!

Order Up! might not be the most exciting game, but it is definitely enjoyable and at times challenging. Fans of the Cooking Mama series are surely going to find something to like in Order Up!, and the refreshing addition of motion-based minigames and micromanaging tasks adds a whole new element. That's one thing I have to give Order Up!  It is dare I say it... "Even Better than Mama!"  Also the fact that it comes at a bargain bin price should attract more than a few gamers to its gameplay.

Personal Opinion: 8/10-

Critical Opinion: 7.0/10- It can take awhile to really get moving towards the end game goal of best chef in town. Theres a variety of cooking tasks, but nowhere near as many as say Cooking Mama's recipes. The restaurant simulator itself requires a lot of multitasking. However, despite my minor gripes...it's wholly enjoyable.

Overall Determination: 7.5/10- What a Bargain!