PlateUp! Review (Appery)
On the surface this may seem like an Overcooked! clone, but it's actually quite different and I love this new addition to the genre. I actually think PlateUp! is closer to a heist game, or a very manual factory-optimisation game.
There's two big loops - First, before every run, you can choose a floor plan, a first menu item, and some additional 'special' pieces of furniture that can break the game just a little bit. The floor plans are like choosing which of the series of rooms and walls is 'least worst' for your workflow. The menu items are pretty solid interesting recipes that have just enough steps in them so it's possible to screw an order up. I've seen a lot of variation in all three of those choices over six hours so there's a lot more to come.
Second, before each of the 15 days in the run, you can buy new restaurant items, and rearrange every object to accommodate. This forces you to pause, reflect on the past day with your team, make some fairly consequential choices to tighten your loops, and attack the next day even better. "If I move the sink into the corner I don't have to move as much to make pizza dough" - "We can't afford both of these so which one will we keep in a cabinet and which one will get vaporised when the day starts?"
There are some really gnarly cool things you can put in your kitchen, and they've put a lot of thought into what would make a kitchen 'em up fun. Some examples: conveyor belts and auto-platers, cleaning robots, speed buffs, items to influence customers' timers and ordering habits.
Playing it solo or co-op always seems fair, and as you progress through the 15 days, things can get very tight. Just like Overcooked, there are some 'clutch serves' and nailbiting moments. I haven't yet made it all the way through a run, but it seems like afterwards, they're going to introduce another layer still of complexity. Bring it on.