Overcooked 2 - Campfire Cook Off DLC Review

Now I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like the homestead can just be too calm. Peace and harmony is for millennials (so they say), so what better way to shatter the tranquility than booting up the latest Overcooked 2 DLC: Campfire Cook Off? I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing both Overcooked 2 and its first DLC Surf’N’Turf, and I’ve always run through them with the kids, but a strange red mist always descends over us as we play.

Now, in our defense we always start every game of Overcooked with the very best of intentions. We always calmly agree jobs should be doled out, one person should call orders, while another tends the chopping boards and boiling pots. It’s very democratic, very calm, very reasonable. So we were all ready to have a really good time toasting some marshmallows.

It took precisely forty-one seconds for the family to degenerate into various shapes and sizes of Gordon Ramsay.

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Ghost Town Games has roadmapped a further two incoming DLC’s for Overcooked 2 and if this is the quality we’re to expect then fans of the series are in for some excellent treats. There’s no skimping on quality or quantity here with twelve levels for less than £5, and, thematically, Campfire Cook Off really delivers the goods.

Overcooked 2 has never shied away from the fact that its shifting levels, barmy food storage placements and questionable appliance placement made for some ridiculously hard levels — making cooperation all the more vital despite increasing the strain on marital and familial relationships. Campfire Cook Off has only gone and ramped up the difficulty and chaos by adding a couple of new elements to the mix. Now you’ve got campfires to maintain, which means stoking them with chopped wood, lest they go cold and stop cooking your gooey marshmallows for the new s’mores recipe. You also have the inclusion of backpacks — which carry ingredients rather than have them be in a single box within the kitchen.

The backpacks in particular have made for some utterly hilarious and frantic chase sequences around the maps as you scrabble to grab a vital ingredient before your fellow player carries on with what they themselves were busy with. I think Ghost Town Games cackled with evil glee when it created them, knowing full well it would ruin friendships.

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Recipe-wise, as mentioned, you have s’mores to cook in various iterations over the campfire as well as frying up a full English (yeah, I’m going with that term, international readers — she’s our baby and we are damn proud of her) breakfast. These aren’t hugely different in their construction to the likes of fajitas, pizzas and the maki rolls of the original game, but variety is the spice of life and the theme is thoroughly enjoyable so while it isn’t reinventing the wheel, it is only very much adding to the already brilliant concepts. Overall, as the first in a new wave of DLC, Campfire Cook Off has come out of the gates swinging.