Travel Cuisine Collector's Edition Reviews

"Travel Cuisine Collector's Edition" 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. "Travel Cuisine Collector's Edition" 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 [*] Travel Cuisine Collector's Edition [/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 "Travel Cuisine Collector's Edition" 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 4 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? "Travel Cuisine Collector's Edition" 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.

So far as value for the price goes, I think that at just under $5, this game is a bit over priced... There has already been a review of this game that was quite thorough and complete...I am not going to reword that here. I think that with all that has already been said in the previous review, that this game should have delivered a bit more. I was able to complete it outside my required time frame to price ratio...which is, 50 cents per hour of play time... but I do make exceptions and it fell within one of my exceptions: that I MUST get at least one hour of play time for each dollar I spend on a game...Barely scraped by. Hey, that's just how I roll...I completed the game in 6 hours. But, I got the game on sale, so it WAS worth it for me. Don't get me wrong, this is a nice TM game and I really did enjoy playing it despite the annoyances that popped up now and again. I enjoyed the complexity even while it made little sense and was annoying. But this company has some great TM games and I really expected much more with this one. All in all, it was worth the cost and I really enjoyed playing it. The music was a bit annoying in this one at times also...work on that guys...better ambiance!

Love time management games and happy to see more being added to Steam, but this one isn't enjoyable atm. It needs polishing, e.g. so we aren't forced to click multiple times around an item to catch its hit box. Also needs balancing to make the upgrades actually useful and challenging to afford. The fish recipes are terrible; there are too many recipes using the same ingredients and equipment, just in a different order. Would be much clearer and more satisfying to add different ingredients/dishes instead. It's unintuitive and frustrating when some items can be put back down (cooked chicken) while others can't (maki). (Or maybe maki CAN be put down, but I simply couldn't find the hit box for it.) Visuals are appealing. Soundtrack is passable. The game mechanics just need improving.

Alright, well... The game isn't bad. It has it's goods and bads, but it's just a normal TM with nothing overly special. I say that because there are some ... Questionable things. First things first: You get to play three regular restaurants + one Collector's Edition. It'll take you about 4hrs+ Depending on how focused you were. Now then... I have a question... WHAT are Matthew and Tammy are to one another? Just friends? Lovers? There is no answer, so I will make up my own then. The money... I think the game kinda forgot to calculate money correctly. Example: 1st restaurant board upgrade cost: 6 coins. Cool. Next restaurant: You will have more than 1k now, so it says: upgrade cost: 6 coins... Not that I wasn't happy... But it's just strange... Because I am pretty certain that didn't happen on third and fourth restaurants! Then there is the matter of the goal money... It shows... 100 coins (example)... And you make... Over 500. Granted that also makes me happy to 5x my pay out, but it isn't really following what is shown. There are also a few bugs... I am pretty certain in the second restaurant you can only use the Stereo ONCE PER LEVEL. I had to make do with that. Then whenever you PACKAGE foods/drink YOU CIRCLE AROUND the entire freaking table before going to package it! Why...? Mostly happened at the last restaurant. And every time you used a stereo... Your character constantly walked down to it... The same thing happens when you go to serve a customer: you go down first, then deliver food to the customer. The strangest part of this game are the food items. Normally you can REMEMBER some recipes and complex ones you might have trouble with, but here... I had trouble with all. Yes. ALL. Not because of my memory, but because the items looked too much alike! In every restaurant! It's not that either, as SOME ITEMS looked like the bean soup... But actually required meat to make... Or it was a burrito... But when you go to make an actual burrito? You'll get it wrong! Because you need a completely different combination of items! All because it has a pepper next to it. But come on! It looks like a burrito and smells like it too! Why does it have two completely separate ingredient recipes?! I could also barely see the peppers/mushrooms... So I had to constantly click on "how do I make this" thing! THEN... How does one make croissants? In this game that is. You take the dough... You give it to the knife wielder to slice it... You take the sliced dough and bake it... Then you take the baguettes and you DIP THEM INTO THE CUPCAKE CREAM! They turn into CROISSANTS! *blinks a few times* How do you make pineapple soup? You take a PLATTER of pineapples... Then put what looks like crushed ice into it and boom: the soup! But what happens if you give the SOUP to the knife wielder?! IT TURNS INTO A CLOUD CAKE! Honestly, the game isn't bad... It just confused me on the items and then there were those bugs... If you gotta get your TM on, you already know what to expect. :)