PlateUp!

As a child of the eighties, couch multiplayer will always be my king. You can’t beat huddling around a TV, looking your poor buddy in the face as you mercilessly dismantle him at a shooter, or throw the odd elbow-dig their way when they’re not pulling their weight in a co-op campaign. But in the year 2024, it’s still possible to execute multiplayer games at the highest level online, with the chaotic culinary co-op, PlateUp!, leading the way in terms of fun. No strangers to testing the limits of our friendship with multiplayer games, I played sous to the gaffer, Chef de Cuisine, VGamingJoe, and we gave being restaurateurs a go.

You could be forgiven for seeing a multiplayer cooking game and immediately diving headlong into comparisons with Ghost Town Games’ tremendous Overcooked, but beyond the gastronomic theme and being incredible fun, there’s more that separates the two games than they actually have in common. Where Overcooked offers a series of short, isolated challenges across tonnes of very different levels, PlateUp! takes you down the roguelike route, continually asking you to adapt your restaurant to keep your diners happy, lest you get shut down for lack of customer satisfaction.

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At A Glance

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PlateUp! is part restaurant simulator, part action game and all roguelike. You can join up with up to three buddies to run your own restaurant, and the gameplay is split up into two distinct sections. Before hours you have to design your eatery, choosing every element in order to offer the best experience to your patrons come opening time. You have to select the decor, choose the dining room layout, tweak the menu, and even build the right kitchen to ensure everything is just where it needs to be. Then once the doors open, you have to do your best Gordon Ramsey and Jean Philippe, rushing around to get everyone seated and served, before tidying up after them and welcoming your next guests. If you stave off the waves of hangry diners and fill all their bellies, you earn the chance to do it all again, hopefully surviving the 15-days it takes to become a coveted 5-star restaurant. 

The ease of the multiplayer, whether through local or online play, is what appeals most with PlateUp!. Dropping into your mate’s game to help out with the lunchtime rush feels like you’re selflessly contributing to the success of Player One. In a world where competitive multiplayer games are ten-to-the-dozen, PlateUp! doesn’t pit players against each other, or force you to compete to “win” a level, instead it encourages you to work towards a common goal. There are still stresses; you can easily block a door, or put a dirty dish where someone is plating a meal, but when you sync up and find a rhythm, the game becomes a breeze to play and is an utter delight.

As two adults with busy jobs and real-life commitments, one very simple feature that we both greatly appreciated was the ability to save our restaurants to come back to later. It sounds ridiculous that we’re praising being able to save your game in 2024, but many roguelikes don’t let you do that midway through a run, and we loved the fact that we could jump in and out as life permitted. (You’re also not tied down to restarting with the same number of players which means that you can jump back in on your own, if you’re so inclined, to make those changes you kept having artistic differences with your partner/s about!)

There is a LOT to like about PlateUp!, not least the number of options you have at your disposal. There’s a good array of cuisines that you can base your restaurant around, and a smorgasbord of starter, main and dessert recipes for you to master too. Then, as well as simple things like ornaments and pictures to help build the right ambiance, there’s all manner of practical items that help you make your restaurant more effective. After each successful day you’re offered a random collection of blueprints for further items, and by working on a blueprint at a Research Desk, you can even create upgraded appliances that entirely change the way you play the game.

Tired of rushing around at opening time, trying to prep and cook all the veggies to make enough soup to feed everyone? No problem, why not prep some soup the night before, whilst the last couple of customers are eating, and stash it in the freezer for the next day? Are you struggling to get all the dishes washed whilst you’re cooking? Install a Soaking Sink and let the appliance do the dirty work while you whip up your dishes. Sick of your buddy burning the goods because he’s trying to do too much at once? Get him a Safety Hob to keep him from cremating his cooking ever again. There’s even the opportunity to install new table types, which will impact what foods the seated guests will order, and a huge array or automation equipment to turn your “mom and pop” eatery into a Year 3000-style YO! Sushi, where food is prepared with gadgets and diners are served by conveyor belt. Each progressive run seems to offer more and more dining room options, leaving your head spinning with what might come next. 

We found that all these new items made us want to play again and again. We’d be opening a new eatery almost immediately after our last diner crashed and burned, and honestly, that can happen in a hurry. You’ll get a game over if just one customer leaves unhappy -whether they’re not fed fast enough or have to wait too long to get a seat- so it’s a high pressure environment. We’d find ourselves cruising through the early stages, setting up the restaurant nicely and then BAM! Out of nowhere, like the proverbial goose, we were cooked. It only takes a few tricky orders back-to-back, or a couple of dishes requiring refires to completely sink your ship. 

We never felt like the difficulty was unfair, but we were often surprised by how fine the knife edge was between success and failure. After each run we’d regroup and talk through what went well and what we should focus on next time, often looking at what upgrades might best help us overcome the flaws in our play style. As the hours rattled past and we began to get better and better, that age-old conversation between friends naturally cropped up. “Do you think we could do this in real life?” It wasn’t long before that idea was squashed though, both realising we’re far too lazy to run a restaurant!

Joe and I reviewed PlateUp! on the PS5, and while this certainly helped with the seamless multiplayer and voice chat (looking at your stupid app, Nintendo!), I was a little sad to discover that PlateUp! doesn’t support crossplay. Most of our buddies play on the Switch rather than Sony’s black and white behemoth, and the ability to drag them into the dining room and boss them around would have brought unimaginable joy! I understand that crossplay comes with all manner of technical requirements and issues, but it is one of the few areas this critic can point to that cost it a MICHELIN Star overall.

We had an excellent time playing PlateUp!, and have no hesitation recommending it for players with a hankering for a decent portion of multiplayer fun. The roguelike mechanics are both solid and tricky to master. It’s addictive to play, and you’ll find yourself laughing and squabbling with your buddies in equal measure, which is great fun. Whilst entirely understandable, the lack of cross-play is one of the only downsides, with perhaps some rather sudden spikes in difficulty coming as a close second. If you’re looking for an engaging, long term multiplayer challenge, tuck in your napkin and take a big bite out of PlateUp!, it’ll satisfy you nicely.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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