Order’s up! Fire up the grill and get cookin’ with Disney

Disney delves into the world of cooking as Kitchen Scramble puts you in the role of an up-and-coming chef who works in a foodtruck traveling throughout towns.

What’s cooking?

While stopping your food truck around the city, different customers will come up and ask for a variety of dishes. After they place their order, you have to rush around the kitchen grabbing ingredients and preparing the food. As you progress through Kitchen Scramble, you must prepare more complicated dishes.

For example, to prepare meat loaf you must: chop some onions, mix the onions with egg and ground beef, and finally bake it in an oven. If you leave food sitting in the pan or in the oven for too long, it burns and must be thrown away.

As you (automatically) learn more recipes, it’s a good idea to consult your cookbook which can be accessed by pausing the game. The recipes are laid out in simple to follow instructions.

Since Kitchen Scramble is a freemium game, you’ll come across the usual stuff associated with a freemium game: recharging energy wait times and special items you can only afford through in-app purchases. These don’t get in the way of gameplay, although you might find yourself waiting for energy to recharge later in the game.

A healthy dollop of tapping

The controls for Kitchen Scramble are simple: tap to interact with an item or customer. For example, tapping on potatoes will cause your character to pick up a potato and tapping on the oven will cause to start cooking a jacket potato. Actions can also be cued up by tapping on multiple items; each item will have a number appear next to it indicating the order of actions.

Cuing up actions is essential when you have a line of hungry customers and you need to prepare meals simultaneously. People playing on smaller devices might have trouble accurately tapping on the correct item, which can be especially annoying when you accidentally start preparing the wrong dish.

4 star presentation

Like most Disney games, Kitchen Scramble looks great. Characters are cartoonish and could be out of an animated Disney film. On the downside, character models are overused and you’ll find yourself in situations where you are serving three identical customers. This is a minor point which doesn’t get much in the way of gameplay, but it would have made the game prettier to look at.

The SFX in Kitchen Scramble captures the sounds of a kitchen. Chopping boards make knocking sounds and ovens alert you with a sharp “beep”. The music in Kitchen Scramble isn’t anything out of the ordinary, but it doesn’t distract you while playing.

It’s not fast food, but it’s not The Ritz either

Kitchen Scramble strikes the right balance of strategy and easy controls which makes for a game that’s fun for kids and adults.