Cooking Craze

Your $100 Mistake Disguised as a Free Game

Big Fish Games made this dopamine trap in 2017, and they know exactly what they're doing. This Seattle-based studio—now owned by Australian gambling giant Aristocrat Leisure after a messy 2018 acquisition—has a storied history of casual game addiction, and Cooking Craze is their magnum opus of manufactured frustration. They've been hemorrhaging staff since 2020, but the game still prints money from people like me who thought "just one more level" was a sustainable lifestyle choice.

The Gameplay Loop

The premise is deceptively simple: tap ingredients, tap the pan, tap the finished dish, serve the customer before their patience meter turns red and they literally morph into angry animals. There's no dragging, no physics—just raw tap speed and muscle memory. You're ping-ponging between grills, shake machines, and garnish stations while analog clocks tick down on every item. The tapping mechanic is deliberately restrictive: you cannot move trays, cannot choose which customer gets served first (the game auto-assigns to whoever waited longest), and if you burn a dish because you over-tapped, you eat the penalty. It's a rhythm game disguised as cooking, and when you're in the zone—nailing 10-dish combos in Bangkok's street food chaos—it feels incredible. The soundtrack is cheerful elevator muzak with regional flair (bossa nova in Rio, koto strings in Tokyo), which somehow makes the crushing defeats even more insulting.

The Moment of Truth

Tokyo Level 110. This is where the game stops pretending to be fun and reveals itself as a psychological experiment in pain tolerance. Multiple Reddit users have documented this specific level as "insane" difficulty, requiring fully maxed upgrades (sushi platters, ramen toppings, the works) and perfect execution with zero customer drop-offs. I watched YouTube walkthroughs where players needed double-money boosters just to scrape by with one star. The level demands you serve an absurd volume of complex multi-ingredient dishes in 60 seconds while customers flood in like a Tokyo subway at rush hour. It's not skill—it's a stat check. If you haven't ground enough coins for upgrades, you will fail 20 times in a row, watch ads for extra lives, and eventually either quit or pull out your credit card. Shanghai Level 74 and Athens Level 120 are similarly sadistic, but Tokyo 110 is the level that makes you question your life choices.

Visuals, Audio & Atmosphere

The art is bright, cartoony, and inoffensive—think mobile game slop but with enough polish to avoid looking cheap. Each city (Paris, Bangkok, Moscow, Buenos Aires, etc.) has themed restaurants with regional dishes: borscht and blinis in Moscow, gyros in Athens, empanadas in Buenos Aires. The UI is cluttered with pop-ups, event timers, and the omnipresent "OUT OF LIVES" nag screen. The analog cooking timers are a nice touch, but the sound design is aggressively chirpy—customers make exaggerated grunt sounds when angry, and the "ding" of a completed dish triggers the same Pavlovian response as a slot machine. It's casino psychology in a chef's hat.

The Narrative/Context

There is no story. You are a nameless chef hopping from city to city for reasons unknown, assembling dumplings and tacos for impatient stick-figure customers who will literally turn into rabid dogs if you're 2 seconds late. The writing is nonexistent, which is a blessing because the game doesn't waste time pretending this is anything other than a skinner box.

Performance, Hardware & Polish

Cooking Craze is mobile-only (iOS/Android), and it runs fine on potato phones because it's essentially a 2D tap-fest with minimal graphical demands. No Steam Deck version exists—this is a touchscreen cash grab through and through. The real performance issue is the energy system: you get 5 lives, lose one per failed level, and they refill at a glacial pace (one every 30 minutes). You can watch ads for extra lives (up to 5 per day), but once those are gone, you either wait, pay for "unlimited lives" bundles ($1.99-$12.99), or grind spoon currency through sketchy third-party offerwalls. The monetization is predatory: levels are balanced to be nearly impossible without boosters (double-money, extra time), which cost premium "spoons" you can only earn through IAPs or ad spam. And here's the kicker: every time you finish a city, the game resets your cash balance to zero. All those coins you ground out in Paris? Gone. Start over in Bangkok with expensive upgrades and pocket change. It's psychologically devastating and 100% intentional. Big Fish deleted entire player progress bugs multiple times (Reddit is full of horror stories), and their support response is "here's some spoons, good luck."

The Verdict

I spent $100.47 on this game. I am not proud. Cooking Craze is mechanically solid, genuinely challenging, and ruthlessly designed to extract money from people with poor impulse control. If you can resist the siren call of microtransactions, you'll get maybe 30-40 levels of fun before the difficulty spikes into pay-to-win territory. If you can't, you'll be explaining to your partner why you bought virtual cupcakes to appease digital hamburger customers at 2 AM.

InGameRiot Score: 4/10

Buy Advice: Hard Pass (unless you're F2P and have monk-level discipline)

The Bottom Line: A casino slot machine that makes you chop onions first.