Top Chef Review

You'd better stir, sauté, and season to save your life in this fast-paced TV show simulation game! The Top Chef game will have you cooking as quickly as you can to produce delectable meals for the judges to sample and score. You have a lot of license to experiment with flavors but be careful! The wrong choices in the Elimination Round will have you packing up your knives and heading home.

Closely Follows the Top Chef TV Show

This game follows its TV show namesake very closely, including the familiar faces and voiceovers of the show's two famous judges, Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio. Each set of levels is divided into “episodes” for the show. This means you will have to compete in two Quickfire Challenges and an Elimination Round, just like the competitors in the show. The Quickfire Challenges are a way to prepare you for the requirements of the Elimination Round, but you can't be eliminated from the show with a poor performance in the Quickfires. This gives you a chance to hone your skills for when it really counts, and makes the game a lot more low-pressure than if every round was an elimination.

Lot's of Creativity Available

This game differs from other cooking games in that it allows you a lot of creativity in your dishes. Rather than requiring you to put specific ingredients in your dish, you are given a pretty wide range of ingredients and just have to match flavors or colors.

For example, the recipe will ask you to put in a vegetable that is red and sweet, or a rich meat. You then are able to choose from 5 or 6 ingredients in that category (vegetables, meats/proteins, and flavorings). When you match a flavor/color profile with the requirements, you earn a flame under that ingredient. This just gives you extra points when that ingredient is added to your dish.

It sounds a little complicated, but you are given flavor profiles before the round begins to help you. Your character will “think” about the meal she is going to prepare, decides which ingredients match what the challenge is, and tell you that certain foods work well together. This gives you an advantage when looking at the ingredients, but most can also be figured out with a little thought. This makes the game very interactive, because the choices you make are reflected in the dish's appearance and what the judges say about it.

Some Frustrating Issues

While it has some great elements, Top Chef also has some major faults. The storyline is totally detached from gameplay and the results of the rounds. In the beginning, even if you win an Elimination Round, your character still whines and complains that she's at the back of the pack. Later, even if you barely pass the round, she supposedly wins and everyone congratulates her. This is highly annoying, because the story of the game goes on its merry way despite what you are actually doing, belying the interactivity of the gameplay. A little more effort in the storyline would have made this a much better game.

The ingredients are also a drawback. More often than not, you aren't given the right ingredients to fully match the recipe. You do eventually get powerups, one of which is to reshuffle the ingredients and get new ones, but these have limited uses and waste valuable time. Most of the other powerups are virtually useless and the game does not make clear what they do and how to use them.

Hard to Get the Bonuses

If you do manage to match flavor profiles and get the right ingredients on the work space, sometimes you will get a “Classic Combo” bonus. These are points bonuses for pairing two ingredients that work well together. You just have to have them both on the table at the same time to get the bonus.

Unfortunately, this bonus seems to be really hit and miss. Because of the limited amount of ingredients, it's hard to match the ingredients they tell you to match before the round. There's no way of really knowing what makes a “Classic Combo” until you get one, so from them on you have to remember what gave you combos before. They are worth a lot of points, which helps you get a better score on your dish, but they are difficult to get. It's also almost impossible to get four or five stars on your dishes without “Classic Combos,” so you have to pay very close attention and remember what works in order to win the challenge or round.

Conclusion - Fun Dish Creation But Terrible Storyline and Frustrating Mechanics Hold It Back

The Top Chef game follows the TV show admirably, with voiceovers and appearances by its two famous judges, the same format including Quickfire Challenges and Elimination Rounds, and a good deal of freedom in creating your dishes. It's a lot of fun to choose what ingredients to use and to see if the judges like your unique creations, but it is very frustrating to be limited by the random ingredients into a bad score and to watch the terribly done storyline.

However, fans of the show will get a kick out of cooking for Padma and Tom, and even those who have never seen the show will probably enjoy the game for a short time, so it's worth the download.