Cooking Trip is an asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated someone else's example/template/tutorial game for a cooking/platespinning restaurant mobile app, changed the name/reskinned a couple of things, and submitted it to Valve as if it was their own game.
Cooking Trip is a pointless restaurant management platespinning type screen tapper/clicker mobile app. As featured in hundreds of mobile apps, gameplay here is a woeful routine of platespinning... that is to say, you need to tap on your iPhone screen to satisfy various customers as they come in and take care of other little busywork jobs. You'll soon find yourself tapping away madly at your iPhone as you have so many customers all at once! Surely the iPhone is the greatest gaming platform of all time, so understandably the developer wants you to pay them for this free mobile app garbage on Steam.
They've dumped this same restaurant manager platespinning mobile app on Steam before. I've seen this same mobile app on app stores from completely different publishers with slightly different skins on it. More intellectual bankruptcy and plagiarism from these guys.
Here's a list of the asset flips of this asset so you can see for yourself:
[list]
[*] Cooking Trip
[*] Cooking Trip Back To Basics
[*] Cooking Trip New Challenge
[*] Katy and Bob Way Back Home
[*] Katy and Bob: Cake Cafe
[*] Katy and Bob: Safari Cafe
[/list]
These are all reskins of exactly the same mobile app! What value do these shallow, fake reskins of a low quality mobile app have for gamers? None at all!
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this mobile app will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The mobile app features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The controls can't be customised because the mobile app has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes Cooking Trip might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a mobile app to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this mobile app is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality mobile app is to be expected.
So, should you buy this mobile app?
Cooking Trip has the total ripoff price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this mobile app could get you games like "Far Cry 3", "Fallout 4" or "Fallout: New Vegas". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
