Shakes on a Plane (Switch)

After the chaotic cooperative cooking of Overcooked achieved incredible success, a wave of indie games with similar ideas cropped up. While this nascent genre lacks a clear name, these games all focus on cooperative work, players needing to perform tasks before time limits expire and while external forces and level designs work against these seemingly simple jobs. Other games in the genre took things away from culinary preparation and started to iterate on the design Overcooked popularized, with games like Unrailed having players work together to build tracks while the train continues forward whether or not there is railroad ahead. However, Shakes on a Plane feels remarkably uncreative by comparison, mostly just trying to do Overcooked’s ideas again but while limited in what gimmicks can fit aboard an aircraft.

 

The game gets off to a rather strange start as the context for why you’re making food for airplane passengers is given a surprising science fiction context. A group of aliens who want to win an interstellar cooking competition believe Earth’s cuisine might hold the key to their success. To better understand the food, they send a group of devices that look like fidget spinners to reanimate a dead woman, free a prisoner, and activate a robotic inflatable stewardess to join their one alien in disguise on board planes. For some reason they believe the food prep featured on commercial aircraft is the best means of learning the secrets to Earth’s cooking, and while there are cutscenes over the course of the game checking in on their efforts, they often have little dialogue or context and can even seem to be setting up something that doesn’t happen such as the pointless plane crash. This inexplicable approach is definitely meant to be ridiculous and the kooky set up might amuse some players, but what might be less amusing are glitches where you finish a level and trigger a cutscene only to need to replay the level because that scene prevented the level from being marked as complete.

Shakes on a Plane’s 27 levels are played in a mostly linear fashion, the next level unlocked after you’ve earned at least 1 star in the current stage. There are some branches, but these take the form of a set of levels you can tackle in your preferred order, the player needing to complete all of them to keep advancing to new stages. All of the game’s levels take place aboard an aircraft of some sort, the game beginning in pretty standard jet liners but later taking on larger and more complex shapes like jumbo jets, areas with two connected cabins, and even some UFOs near the end of the adventure. These aircraft are all viewed with the roof peeled off the plane so you can always see the lay of the area, but there are some visual issues when it comes to the orders people make. Their requests will appear as little bubbles with timers above them, the player sometimes needing to really squint to make sure they’re putting the right ingredient on a skewer or right materials into a shake. The only one that seems to be a consistent problem though are the luggage tags, wherein each one contains a letter and number you need to match and the small text can make it hard to determine if you want the luggage marked with a B or a D.

 

When you start a level, the game having every player rejoin every time and reselect their characters to slow down that process, you’ll start getting orders from the passengers, the planes gradually having more complex and varied tasks to manage. Starting off you’ll mostly just be heading to machines that pop out a ready-made water bottle or coffee cup for delivery, but later down the line you’ll need to start grilling burgers and fries, mixing shakes, and cooking shish kebabs. Tasks unrelated to food prep like disposing of trash are added to your time-sensitive tasks, the player even needing to deliver air sick bags and scoop up snakes before they hurt anyone as you get into the later levels. So long as everyone gets their orders on time and no one is harmed either by something like a snake or you charging through them as they amble around the plane, you won’t have anything count against your end of level rating. However, a singular failure heavily impacts your score, even a string of successes not able to easily undo the damage an unhappy customer wreaks on your star rating. You can aim to earn three stars in each level although it’s not necessary, the next level unlocking so long as you can squeak by with one, and as you get deeper into the game this starts to feel more and more appealing.

There are many hazards to you getting your work done quickly and efficiently in Shakes on a Plane. Besides having to make sure you don’t get bitten by a snake yourself and trying to get your orders out before the passengers get impatient, you also need to watch out for things like turbulence making the plane dip,objects like carts might smash into you as they roll about, hatches that can open and drop you out of the plane, and little kids who run around grabbing things to make a mess. Rather than interesting gimmicks and complications these mostly feel like annoyances where you either accept their presence or quickly accommodate the problem and then get back to work. One particularly annoying problem added to the fray is when the plane experiences exceptionally powerful turbulence, the player needing to find a seat and sit down as they wait out the danger for what feels like far too long of an interruption in these otherwise short levels. The timers won’t tick down during this period either, which mostly just makes this seem like a frivolous interruption that rarely impacts the player in an interesting way. The game in general has a lot of things that seem to go very slowly despite it overall trying to have short stages, the tutorial videos for new mechanics in particularly agonizingly sluggish even when conveying basic ideas.

 

While the late game starts relying more on things like conveyor belts and teleporters to get important items to places they otherwise can’t reach, the game never really seems to reach the frantic fun of something like Overcooked. Instead, it really does feel like you’re just doing an actual job, needing to make sure you do menial work expediently while dealing with customers who seem to amble about or deliberately cause problems. You may be playing as an alien in a flimsy disguise, but you stand around waiting for orders to be ready, deliver them, wait for the next one, and continue from there. Somewhat imprecise hitboxes for picking up things and the troubles the game has with the seemingly simple act of placing items on a single tray together can make doing the relatively simple work sometimes frustrating, and there’s never really an interesting level of pressure or exciting gimmick to spice things up.

 

There does at least seem to be some difficulty scaling, not that it helps with the game’s overall lack of energy. You can have up to four players working together to fulfill orders, but if you’re on your own you can swap between two characters to get the job done. While failures are punished harshly in your end of level rating, the workload is adjusted to the amount of players participating, meaning going solo even in the harder levels is manageable. It might even be a little too forgiving, since while it won’t be a guaranteed win and getting three stars would be a feat, completing a level doesn’t really require much thought or sometimes even really utilizing your entire crew effectively. Characters have special abilities that are meant to help out, but besides the alien’s always active speed boost they’re barely worth worrying about due to limited effects and not really helping with the main tasks by comparison. It’s just another area where Shakes on a Plane has a lot of surface level variety but it doesn’t do much to spice up the work as it fails to truly push the player to play in new or diverse ways.

THE VERDICT: While some of Shakes on a Plane’s flaws are immediately apparent like struggles with picking up the desired objects or outright glitches in level completion, its bigger problems arise from how it utilizes seemingly strong gameplay ideas. Having to manage all the different tasks aboard the plane as the work becomes more complex and varied and hazards get in your way sounds like a fine fit for some chaotic co-op fun, but the workload given to you never really demands the level of energy or task juggling that could make things challenging in an exciting way. Obstacles to success like turbulence are mostly just annoyances rather than an interesting new variable, and actually completing a stage doesn’t seem to require much clever planning or sharp reflexes despite how harsh a failure penalty can be. All the silliness seen in the cutscenes is lost when you’re actually on board the plane playing a game that really does feel more like a job than an over the top twist to working on an aircraft.

 

And so, I give Shakes on a Plane for Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. A bit more pep and energy in Shakes on a Plane would go a long way to giving the game some of that much needed excitement, but mostly it feels like the game was lacking in ideas for interesting complications to your work. Having the timers be tighter with the gimmicks in place would probably just lead to little quirks like the occasional item pick up problem becoming far more annoying. Hatches opening, disruptive turbulence, and the fairly tame snakes really don’t push you to adjust your plans much, with the teleports perhaps coming closest to an idea that actually does require planning and coordination rather than accepting sometimes you’ll be interrupted by some nuisance. Teleporting stuff around requires players to identify what they’re capable of and working together to deliver and prepare meals properly, but even in single player play I could find myself doing most as one attendant and in multiplayer it rarely felt like people needed to coordinate on which order they were planning to fulfill. The tepid trials and tasks found throughout most of the 27 levels thus are often more boring than they are outright terrible or grueling unless you really want to hit those three star ratings. Picking up the game’s pace would definitely help to combat the lifelessness of this job-like play, but it still feels like more creative mix-ups are definitely the route to go so that true complications would demand you to change up how you play.

 

While I can’t find any interviews or behind-the-scenes looks at the game, it does feel like perhaps the name parodying the 2006 film Snakes on a Plane might have locked this game into some of its creative doldrums. The developers clearly wanted to make a twist on the Overcooked formula but didn’t really have anything to offer besides the airborne setting, and it feels like Overcooked could have milked the potential out of the idea in fewer levels with greater effect. Perhaps the main difference is that Shakes on a Plane feels like it is too focused on the order delivery aspect than its preparation, leaving you with less to juggle and the task feeling too straightforward and bland because of it. The steps to completing an order aren’t involved enough and the complications don’t serve as strong enough obstacles, Shakes on a Plane failing to bring the necessary video game twist to the cooperative work to actually make it engaging rather than a batch of boring chores to complete.