Battle Chef Brigade (PC): Part of a balanced meal

So every so often, in between streaming planned games on my rinky dink little channel, I will toss out a poll or ask for random suggestions for stuff to play.  Sometimes I get good ideas, other times I get random stuff out of the blue. This one was suggested to me by a friend and while the title rung a bell, I knew it was a game I had never played before.

But I knew that Amazon Prime had been giving away a bunch of games to Twitch Prime users, so after getting the suggestion I took a look and lo-and-behold I actually had a copy of the game. Never downloaded once and never played. So I figured why the hell not?

BATTLE CHEF BRIGADE (PC)

Taking place in a fantasy setting, the story of Battle Chef Brigade takes place in the nation of Victusia. A world where the fantasy races were once overrun by monsters, a group of people discovered that not only could monster meat be edible, but can also be deliciously prepared.  This group eventually became an elite brigade of individuals who would be known as Battle Chefs.

For the past 100 years, people from all over the land would meet in the capital city to compete for their right to join their ranks. This is done so in a tournament when aspiring chefs are given a time limit to hunt for and prepare a specific monster type, while also catering to the individual tastes of their judges. Those who progress would earn their right to join the Battle Chef Brigade.

In the Windy City off the main continent, A young girl named Mina lives a happy but unfulfilling life working at her family's restaurant. She is a very good cook, but she longs to be more creative and experimental with her cooking. She dreams of one day leaving home and joining the Brigade, and practises her cooking and magic daily to do so. And when the tournament finally comes around, she swindles the money she needs to take her chance at entering the tournament.

If that sounded to you like I was describing a fantasy version of Top Chef on Bravo, then you would be absolutely correct. That is almost exactly what this game is. It's a bit of a mish-mash of gameplay elements but when put together it certainly comes out interesting. I would say that it breaks down into 3 major elements to its palate: Story, Cooking, and Hunting. 

Typically, between the chapters and during the town segments of the game is where much of the characters and plot get fleshed out. Everything operates on the 2D plane if you compared it to the town segments of Dragons Crown you would be in the correct ballpark. I don't want to say it does the visual novel approach because It doesn't use that specific style. It would say that it's a more comic book style of delivery the way it's presented, but with the anime inspired characters I would say that visual novel isn't a stretch either. 

When in town, you can talk to and challenge other chefs and people to cooking battles, work side jobs to earn some extra money, and use the shop to buy new recipe books a cooking equipment. There are three major tasks you can do, two of them for cooking and one for hunting.

The cooking mechanic in this game is done via a puzzle mechanic, although the rules of this change depending on what cooking task you are doing between battling, research, and making money. Typically you add you ingredients which have a set of colored circles representing elements of wind, fire, and water. To make a quality dish, by spinning them in squares of 4 you line up 3 of the same element together, causing them to merge into one LV2 core of that element. Those LV2s can then be done again to become a LV3. You want to squeeze in as many as you can while using the ingredient given in the battle rules, while having more of the judge's preferred element.

As you play through the game, it throws in other pieces that can affect your dish like poisoned pieces that explode if jostled too much, cracked pieces that can break after three moves, bones that can be turned into wild card pieces, and so on. Some of these can be maneuvered or changed on their own, but sometimes you might need to use an additional cooking tool to remove them. Some tools have very specific uses, others will provide better bonuses while you cook.

But the ingredients are not just provided to you, oh no, you have to go and hunt for you ingredients. So if you leave your Kitchen just to the left, suddenly you are in a 2D hack n' slash game in the vein of Muramasa: The Demon Blade or probably more appropriately Dust: an Elysian Tail.  You run and jump along multi tiered levels hacking, slashing, and casting spells at monsters and why they die they drop a series of ingredients to bring back. You can only hold so much but you can make multiple trips at the start to have a cache ready to go.

Because of the radical and jarring switch, it can lead to a hilarious moment for someone who might not be paying attention. I had a friend watching me stream, she looked away for a second and I had gone from cooking with a pan, to jumping around throwing whirlwinds at a dragon. It's both sweet and savory as it was ridiculous and fucking awesome.

Combat is kept relatively simple with one button for physical attacks and one for magical that have different effects depending on what direction you are pressing, which allows for just enough nuance for you to really sink your teeth into combos to find something you like to do. In my case I love to combo followed by a sweep that causes knock up, then jumping after them for a air combo. I am all over combat like this like butter on a baked potato.

Now if these were the only two elements in the game this would probably be enough to carry the game, but I mentioned before that they spice up the cooking mechanic with the different jobs you can do. Basically it changes the rules. When doing cooking research, you are given a set score and set ingredient and you need to figure out how to match that score using only what you are provided with. You can do it as many times as you like, but you need to strategically move things to get the best possible outcome without wasting any of your pieces.

The other is basically working as a short order cook, and here the woman who runs the restaurant is not looking for haute cuisine. These are people who know what they want and know what they like. So you are given puzzle, and they just want you to match the pieces as the customer asked for it. Some of them are pretty easy to do, some get more involved, and you want to get them all out as fast as you can so you can earn more tips over the course of your shift.

There is also a hunting task to do, but it ultimately doesn't change the core combat mechanic. You usually are just provided a goal of how many to hunt, or what specifically to hunt. But it does push the story further with a specific character, so it's a nice little side dish on top of making some money with it. 

As I write this review, I learned that there is apparently a whole number of game modes I didn't even notice when I started playing. The game also features a split screen multiplayer mode, online leader boards, a free play mode, survival mode, restaurant rush, and "break the dishes" mode. That is actually a pretty meaty amount of content outside of the main story. 

I seriously had no idea these existed till I started writing this. 

I really don't have very much to complain about on this one, really. Just a handful of minor complaints. To the game's credit it does have a very unique and well designed set of characters. Everyone who has any kind of major speaking line is very much distinguishable in their appearance so there is little room to confuse characters. That being said? There is a sore lack of actual animation of this. 

Picture a series of hand drawn anime cels, and then give those characters a series of different poses and facial reactions. It really does go back to the visual novel appearance without the tight zoom in over the text box. Characters just jump from pose to pose, which again fits with the comic aesthetic it appear to be going for.  But when you jump into the combat portions of the game you will notice that while there are definitely more frames for animation for some of the actions, it definitely does have a 8 or 16 bit RPG animation style. The run action might be just 3 or 4 frame cycled through. The plus is they move fast enough and fluidly enough with the controls that while it's noticeable, it's not jarring of off putting. 

The music really isn't anything to write home about. This is really a big kneecapping of the fantasy genre as a whole. Unless you have a truly unique melody that catches the ear and keeps in fresh in your head, the all fantasy themed game music is really just going to sound bland. Everything feels fitting about it, but none of it is remarkable. 

The voice acting a strange mixed bag. I don't know how to explain it. The voice acting is well done. It's competently delivered with out feeling to cheesy or hokey. But there is a roughness to it that makes it feel unpolished. I don't know if I can describe it, it feels like the audio is not mixed properly. Lines are delivered with the gusto, but perhaps without an understanding of what it is they are actually reading the lines for.  Sometimes dialog feels too abruptly cut, sometimes it feels like voice lines are too loud for the scene.  There's just an...... off-ness about it. You'd have to hear it to get what I mean. 

I would very much like a clearer understanding of what catering to a judges taste actually means during the actual cooking battle portions. One person will tell me to cook with wind, so I will prepare a dish that is filled with LV3 wind pieces, and then in my judging she'll fucking complain about it. Bitch, have you tried to instill dragon's flavor in the air? It hasn't really affected my ability to progress in the game, but I don't know if I actually understand what I am being scored on. 

Now, from where we stand you are probably thinking sounds pretty stupid. And I'm not going to lie to you I was right there with you. As I was streaming through the first few chapters of the game, I certainly was having fun with it, but it was always prefaced with a laugh about how dumb this game was. But at the end of chapter 2, I got slapped with a story line twist I did not see coming. I closed my stream short after that, but after maybe about 30 minutes I couldn't help but want to see what was going to happen next.

The game pretty much had me at that point. I had to go back for seconds because after that first taste I was hungry for more. I gave up the premise of making it the next weekly stream because I couldn't wait to get back to it. It was genuinely fun to play by not taking itself too seriously, yet earnestly delivering its tale it was impossible to not fall in love with it or its characters. 

At the time of writing I haven't finished this one because I have so many other games on my plate, but I absolutely intend to finish this one. Like I have alluded to at the start of this review it borrows a some tried and true game elements and doesn't really reinvent the wheel, but the obscure combination hack n' slash and puzzle with a fantasy cooking theme that they put together some how managed to fit together beautifully. 

It's campy, has fun characters, fluid combat, an engaging puzzle mechanic, and a surprisingly deep and interesting storyline. It's because of all these that I'm willing to give Battle Chef Brigade a recommendation. Is this a world beater that will be showered with accolades? Of course not, but it currently sells for 19.99 on Steam, PS4, and Nintendo Switch and you will definitely get more than 20 bucks worth of entertainment out of this one.

I give this game 5 star review on Whelp!.... Get it? Cuz it's fantasy? And Whelps are baby dragons? Ehh? EH??.... Ok... I'll stop now.

"You need to prepare a dish with fire, wyvern blood, pixie wing and your mystery ingredient..... CHICKEN!"
"FAAAACK. What the fuck is chicken?! How am I supposed to work with that?!"