Cooking Craze

I will start with the positives: the art in this game is vibrant and exciting, and the food looks amazing!

For the rest...
Progression overall feels very slow and extremely repetitive; necessary upgrades are expensive and will force you to replay levels that the game picks for you. Want to replay a specific level to get the cash? Nope! You have to play level 1 (or another low level) over and over again if you want it! This forces losses on higher levels unless you are willing to spend real money or grind out the currency to get the upgrades that will allow progression. And when you do finally finish a location, currency and upgrades are lost upon arrival at the next location, so you have to start over from nothing each time.

I played Cooking Craze as a mobile game before it came to the Steam store, so I knew what I was getting into when I started it. I just like to suffer for my Steam achievements, I guess. The Steam version of the game is almost fully a clone of the mobile app--there aren't even any changes to the UI. The usual mobile game tactics are still present, too; there's a time-gated hearts/lives system, intrusive pop-ups every level trying to get you to spend real money, etc.

I love cooking/food service games, and this game really removes the joy that i usually get from these types of games. The game being "free", yet having nearly-forced microtransactions for progression feels slimy and prevents me from recommending this to anyone. See the amount of "booster pack" DLCs, many being $50-120, available from this developer as an example.

Pay to win. once you finish the first city they make it impossible to beat levels unless you buy the level enhancements to meet the goals

I want to love this game. I played it when it first released and it was much easier. Now they seem to make the game so much harder in order to force you to buy their perks and boosters. I barely made it to the second city without uninstalling. I even broke down and purchased the pass for $12 and still managed to fail levels. They changed the money system to make the game more difficult. Now each city has it's own currency and there's no point in replaying levels or being able to start the next city with any type of advantage. The customers are so slow on the timed levels. They walk all the way across the screen as you are forced to watch your time drain. This game cheats horribly in so many ways. I wish there was a version of this game I could just pay for, but I can't find one. This game is just a predatory cash grab wrapped up in a you can do it for free bow. There's got to be better out there.