Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!

Being a unique take on the cooking party game genre, Cook, Serve, Delicious 2 makes a huge improvement from the first installment: - Two-player co-op is actually co-op rather than separating the control into two parts. - Gorgeous food artwork that made you wish you can eat them in real life. - Way fewer down time. - Default difficulty is challenging enough without needing to crank up the difficulty. However, this is the type of game that you would find it decent in the first few hours, but due to the nature of its gameplay design, it exposes its flaws very soon. The first problem that stands out is the in-game ingredient key-mapping. The key per ingredient default setting is very arbitrary and has no consistency whatsoever. Sometimes it uses the first letter of the food and sometimes it tries to remain consistency with other dishes having the same ingredient, so when you combine different food that has ingredient keys mapped in a different logic, it becomes very annoying. Luckily, there is key-mapping setting for every individual food, which brings the second problem. The second problem is that the key-mapping settings is so inconvenient and frustrating to use, to a point that it feels that the developers don't want the players to re-map their terrible default key mappings. In order to set the ingredient key-mapping to one's preference, you need to go to the food catalog, which has every single recipe listed, find the food for which the ingredient keys you want to re-map, enter practice mode to make the food yourself, and then you can re-map the keys during the practice. There is no "food search" function in the food catalog, which means you have to go through every single food if you want to remap that one dish which has key-mappings you want to change! The existing filter system is next to useless because you are never sure what arbitrary category each food is put into. Also, keys for the chores cannot be remapped for no good reason whatsoever. I absolutely despise this game purely for the key-mapping settings in the game. It is designed to be as inconvenient as possible. I am not recommending this game purely out of this reason, but I am not done yet. The third problem is that the requirement for gold medal made this game very frustrating to play. To get a gold medal, you have to make no mistakes at all for the whole day. Remembering that I said this game has a "relatively" low down time compared to its first installment? Getting all gold medal for every stage greatly amplifies those down time, because for the 6 and a half minutes of gameplay, only around 2 minutes during the rush hours are remotely challenging, and failing just one single dish means you had just essentially wasted a couple minutes of your life accomplishing nothing other than staring at the empty screen waiting for customers to arrive and rush hours to end. I hate how every single subtle failure becomes a reminder of my time wasted on a level. I can't express how much I despise this game for its various problems but still want to finish it, and this mindset made me hate this game even more. I wish I had never bought it in the first place.