Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe (PS4)
Looking at the gameplay of Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe, it can be quite tempting to bill it as a game that mixes the thrill of hunting monsters with the joy of cooking, but this is simply the story context of the game. At its core, Battle Chef Brigade is truly a clever puzzle game that mixes together different gameplay styles to take the simplicity of a match three puzzle game and enhance it into something strategic with many different factors to consider when it comes time to match similarly colored spheres.
The cooking in Battle Chef Brigade is a brilliant way of uniting the many different considerations you’ll need to make during a single match. The player will be matched up in a duel with an opponent, both players needing to create dishes for up to three judges. Each judge has unique taste preferences, these being represented by the green, blue, and red spheres you’ll be matching when it comes time to cook. Some can prefer more than one flavor, but if you serve them a meal with with their favorite flavors as the most present ingredients, they’ll give you extra points when it comes time for them to judge your dish. Each judge gets a separate meal, so you’ll usually be putting together multiple meals at a time, trying to personalize them while also adding in whatever that round’s required ingredient might be. The ingredients you collect all add a certain amount of pieces to that dish’s puzzle area, the player then able to mix them together to make matches that will combine similarly colored pieces into one super piece that will free up space and score better with the judges. You won’t be able to see how your opponent is performing while you cook, so aiming for the highest score while balancing the inclusion of the right flavors and key ingredient means the tile matching portion is just as much about what you put in as it is how you combine them to make room for more ingredients, every addition raising the score. You don’t really need to consider what the end product will look like as the visual form the food takes is more of an aesthetic thing than a mechanical consideration, but the game still does put in plenty of different outcomes that can look unusual or appetizing depending on which ingredients were thrown in.
The puzzle matching is the most important part as it is how you’ll be making the meals you are graded on, but getting the ingredient involves the battle chefs running off to an adjacent area to take down monsters. If you come to the game for action, this section might seem a little simple. Most monsters are easily handled, your attack options being a few basic attack combos and some magic skills that keep their focus on movement and damage rather than any complex functions, but that’s because this action exists in service of the puzzle mechanics. When you are hunting monsters for ingredients, the purpose is to supplement your cooking, the player needing to learn which monsters give which color ingredients and balance the time they spend hunting with the time they spend cooking. While there are some bigger monsters like the Hydra and Dragon who require you to dodge more intelligently and put up a good fight, the battle isn’t the focus so much as the risk of spending time with such a durable foe versus the reward of receiving the prime ingredients they drop. It can be more worthwhile though to repeatedly kill the weak monsters like the carnivorous plants and cave crabs though, their materials easier to acquire and thus making them good for getting repeated matches in a dish in a short time. You can only carry so many ingredients back too, and some ingredients can be eaten by monsters to turn them into new materials like eggs from bird monsters or digested items from slimes. When you go out hunting, you do so with purpose, and while you can die here, you get set back to the kitchen without ingredients as punishment rather than having a restart forced. Still, the time wasted falling in combat can be devastating to the quality of your final dish, the timer for when you need to turn it in balanced pretty well to ensure you need to stay constantly active during a cooking duel.
The final component to consider when entering a cooking battle is what materials you’re entering with. Over the course of the game you can earn or buy different items that can help with the preparation of your meals. The most important will be your pots and pans, some having unique traits like being able to slow cook ingredients for matchless ingredient upgrades or being able to match two instead of three but only of a specific color. You can bring in three different pieces of cookware to find what arrangement works best for your cooking needs, but you can also bring three special items in that can be things like free starting ingredients or sauces that can change an ingredient’s colors. Finally, you get a few items to increase your potential during the hunting portion, all of this again playing into making the best meal possible but never making it so easy you’ll breeze through a duel. To get many of these items will involve buying them at the shop, and to get cash usually involves working at three different places in the game’s story mode. There is an area focused on the matching portion of the game, puzzles where you need to rotate your ingredients right to get the required score and thus training you to be better at matching in the duels. The diner also helps you better your skills by focusing on speed and finding matches quickly so you can better handle the time crunch during battles, but the hunting missions are bit less meaningful, their focus being on tracking down specific monsters and similar ideas that can familiarize you with the battle portion, but its hardly an area that needs much skill honing comparatively. Your cash and the items in the store scale well to make your increasing capabilities balanced by the point of the game you’re at, so even before you begin a duel, you’re already puzzling out how best to enter it when it comes to your tools.
The color matching starts simple as well, but soon new ideas enter it that break you away from the comfort zone you might find yourself falling into. Beside the red, blue, and green pieces, there are later poison and bone pieces. Bones can only match with themselves and are pretty rare parts, but they can be hard to remove when in your meal. Poison, as you might expect, is bad to have in your meal, the judges docking points if they find it. Both bones and poison can be remove by matching them with themselves or using special cutting tables and other items to clear them, but the poison also can be eliminated by rotating it enough, the mixing causing it to burst and leading to the last major piece type: cracked pieces. These can be found naturally in the wild as well, but cracked pieces are color ingredients that, if mixed too many times, will downgrade or even disappear, the player needing to be smarter with their matching than ever when these crop up to ensure they don’t miss out on potential dish enhancements through sloppy rotating. On top of all these piece types is also a combo system, where if multiple ingredients are matched in quick succession, some cookware allows for designated areas to become enhancing spots where a sphere can receive a free upgrade. Combining all these elements, from the competitive dueling aspect to the ingredient collecting and the color matching, you have a game that constantly keeps you moving and thinking about what needs to be done, when to do it, and how you could be doing better, and this is before we even add the delightful story mode to it all.
Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe is the tale of a girl named Mina who lives in a fantasy world where the humans keep the monsters at bay by deploying battle chefs to take them down and convert them into delicious meals. Mina aspires to be a battle chef herself, her laser-focused ambition blinding her to much else in life but not compromising her likeability at all. Becoming a member of the Battle Chef Brigade involves entering a tournament full of duels with other Battle Chef prospects, and many of the other chefs Mina will encounter on her quest are high personality individuals who are fun to interact with. There are characters like the orc Thrash who despite feeding monster parts to his blade to go into berserk mode when hunting is actually a very sweet guy with a loving wife and kids and an eccentric necromancer named Ziggy whose disposition and references seems more akin to a guy you’d meet in real life and thus he hardly makes sense to the residents of this fictional world. There are small side stories to follow as well, such as a grumpy dwarf who harbors a crush for the woman running the diner and a flamboyant orc named Wart who gets discouraged by his failed duels on his path to becoming a battle chef. The battle chef tournament is the big focus of most of the game, but new directions do crop up along the way to add more intrigue to what might have been a straightforward tournament otherwise, things like a blight cropping up that makes the monsters more dangerous and their ingredients poisonous making up much of the game’s later portions but also a humorous tale of thespian thieves injecting some humor into the back half without compromising any emotional moments. With well voiced characters and some lovely anime style visuals, it’s quite easy to get attached to the world and characters, even when some of your opponents may just have interesting designs rather than much of a chance to establish themselves.
Once you have completed the story though, there’s still more to do in Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe. Multiplayer will allow you to play as Mina, Thrash, or Ziggy in competitive duels with other people which have an incredible level of customization. You can pick the required ingredient, the judges, the areas you’ll hunt and more, but you can have it all random if you like too. There are other modes available for a single person to play as well, such as a Break the Dishes mode about hitting all the targets in a short amount of time, a Survival mode where you need to keep making new dishes and gradually unlock upgrades along the way, and a Daily Cook-Off where you get new cooking challenges every day. The story is well-paced to keep bringing challenging duels to you, but these offer another way to extend your puzzle cooking experience after an already excellent single-player campaign.
THE VERDICT: Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe is a marvelous puzzle game that elevates the simple task of matching similar colored spheres into something exceptional with the many layers of planning and time management required to win the cooking duels and impress the judges. What you bring into a duel, the monsters you hunt, the ingredients you add to a dish, and how you mix it all together while under a time limit brings the hectic energy of Iron Chef into a setting where you don’t need to know how to cook to perform like a master chef. Every activity exists as a component of making the best meal you can with what’s available, the strategy needed to excel making for constantly involved play where you’ll always be thinking of what you need to do next to improve your dish. With all of this attached to a charming story full of fun characters and some post-game extra modes to keep things fresh after, Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe is a delicious puzzle game for players looking for a well-executed potpourri of gaming concepts.
And so, I give Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe for the PlayStation 4…
A FANTASTIC rating. It might be easy to get caught up on the simplicity of the combat when looking at Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe, but what it truly is under the hood is a game that manages to extend its puzzle elements outside of the frying pans where you do the actual color matching. Killing a monster isn’t hard, but it is something vital to food prep and a consideration that must be balanced with the many other tasks you’ll need to complete to get the best dish possible to the judges. It’s a game that rewards learning the ingredients monsters drop and where to find them, it’s one that gives you a variety of tools to suit your cooking style or areas you need to improve on, it gives you plenty of practice in the money-making jobs, and it contextualizes it all in an inviting world full of fun characters to face in duels or befriend on your journey to become a Battle Chef. It’s certainly a game about having your expectations set properly, as the genres it combines all serve their roles well but wouldn’t work on their own, but as a complex puzzle game it is a marvelous mix of elements that don’t strain a player’s skills with the genre deviations, instead rewarding quick thinking and smart planning in how the play styles come together.
Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe has certainly impressed this particular judge. It uses its elements as needed to supplement the strong flavor of the puzzle game at the core of its design, every part playing in important role even if they might have been simple on their own. On its own, a single ingredient like the combat would perhaps be mild, but to judge it so would ignore its role in the final product, almost like saying that a cake can’t be enjoyed if you don’t like the taste of eggs. When the genres are blended together here, Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe comes out better because of how its components are mixed into its delightful flavor of involved puzzle solving.