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5.7 mid-normal
Jennyfer Johnsonpots has just graduated from cooking school. Like so many of us she dreams of ignoring her classmate Ronald's father's offer of being a chef in his established restaurant. Instead she'd rather open her own small diner. However a quick trip to the bank reveals she doesn't have enough credit for a sizable loan. Poor Jenny! Luckily she spots a copy of The Cooking Times on a park bench. Inside is an ad for a special young chef's contest. The winner will receive one million dollars, which is more than enough for her to make her dreams come true. Before Jenny can say, "I'm in," she's in! But there's only one problem - her classmate Ronald is also a contestant!
Yes, her name really is Jennyfer Johnsonpots!
Champion Chef, from Teggo Fun Factory, is like Pizza Chef and similar games. It's a time management game more focused on cooking and matching than serving customers, though as Jenny you'll do both.
On the right of the game screen is a large board of various ingredients. Drumsticks, pasta, pineapples, tomatoes, porkchops, half-pint cartons of milk, etc. With these simple ingredients a skilled chef can whip up just about anything. To the left of the ingredients board is a view of your restaurant.
As customers sit and make orders, lists of ingredients will appear next to their tables. Gameplay involves dragging groups of ingredients onto the customer until you've met or exceeded the required number of ingredients for the recipe. Groups are selected automatically, and are made up of any ingredients of like kind touching vertically or horizontally on the board. Ingredients removed from the board cause others to fall down to fill in the empty space. This is good because ingredients are constantly rising toward the top of the screen. (Similar to Tetris if you play it upside down in a kitchen.) If ingredients reach the top and overflow, you will lose points!
Once the ingredients are all assembled, the recipe is instantaneously prepared and delivered to the customer's table. He or she instantaneously consumes it, drops a tip on the table, and instantaneously exists the restaurant. As soon as you click on the tip, the table is clear and another customer will quickly sit down.
As you progress through the chefing/cooking contest, you'll work in various restaurants around the world, serving various customers. Blue collar workers tip well, but are a little impatient. Tourists can wait forever before getting angry and leaving, but don't tip so well. Students are the same. Business women are very impatient but tip even better than blue collar workers, etc. There are more customer types, but I didn't see them all because I got bored with Champion Chef and returned to my hobby, which is yelling out the window at the horses I keep in a neighboring field.
Occasionally powerups will appear in the ingredients board, such as pieces of candy. The more pieces of candy you stuff into a customer, the happier they'll be. I got some pretty good tips by doping businesswomen up with candy just before delivering their meal. There are other powerups, such as a token that if selected clears all the ingredients in its row. That can be useful sometimes to regroup ingredients that have become divided. The larger a group of ingredients, the less times you have to click back and forth on the screen to fill those really big recipes.
Let me tell you about the time I used to be a cook at the Old Warehouse Restaurant in Roscoe Village, Ohio. They say the place was haunted, and the manager told me he heard sounds of something heavy dragging across the attic floor one night. The attic is just above the office. He thought it was probably a coffin. (Because the building used to house a coffin maker, and there are still a few coffins in the attic.) The head waitress, Helen, told me she saw the ghost of a woman in the basement bar. I never experienced anything supernatural there.
Champion Chef is not a very exciting game. It's frustrating when you've got a restaurant filled with customers and your ingredients board is all mixed up with groups of only one or two ingredients. That means you have to constantly click back and forth between the board and the customers, all the while watching them become more and more angry and more and more red-faced. (Except the head-bobbing happy-go-lucky tourists.) The music gets repetitive quickly.
And is it so hard to hire a native English speaker for $40 to check the grammar and spelling in your game? I mean, I pay a high school kid to proofread these reviews so surely Teggo Fun Factory could find someone online to proofread their games. All kinds of misspellings and weird English are on show here.
Overall, I would recommend saving your money and going on a whitewater rafting trip instead of buying this game.