Overview
What is Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together?
Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together is a cooking and restaurant simulation game that puts you in charge of your own restaurant, building it from a small-town gem to a five-star restaurant. It is the next entry in the Cooking Simulator series, now "bigger, better," and most importantly, with the addition of the long-awaited multiplayer feature.
It builds upon the foundation of its predecessor with an expanded gameplay loop that includes customer handling and ingredient preparation, a customizable appearance for your chef, more rewarding progression nodes, and more.
Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together features:
⚫︎ 80+ Recipes to Cook, 200+ Ingredients to Discover
⚫︎ Blueprint System To Make Your Own Dishes
⚫︎ Fun, Chaotic, Multiplayer Aspect
⚫︎ Lots of Cooking Fun
| Digital Storefronts | ||
|---|---|---|
 Steam |
||
| $24.99 | ||
Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together Review: Still Half-Baked
The Mundane is the New Trend
I’m a huge fan of simulation games, and luckily for me, cozy and mundane-style simulator games of all shapes and sizes have proven themselves to now be a mainstay in the gaming sphere. While simulation games were long defined by The Sims franchise and sports simulation games like the annual NBA and FIFA titles, there’s a new niche within the genre that’s been gaining traction—the job simulators.
PowerWash Simulator 1 and 2, Crime Scene Cleaner, Fast Food Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator, TCG Card Shop Simulator, Supermarket Together, Car Service Together—and the titles just keep on coming; it’ll take me forever to list them all. And one in particular has garnered a pretty strong following for itself: Cooking Simulator.
Cooking games have long been part of the internet scene (those cooking Flash games of old, and the Papa’s Pizzeria-Burgeria-Sushiria-Freezeria-and-more series, to name a few), but none seemed to have grasped the detail and freedom of the original Cooking Simulator. It’s been seven years since it was released, and it has been receiving updates and DLCs, with the most recent one launching in 2025.
For 2026, though, they have something else up their sleeve—Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together (or CS2 for short). The sequel comes bundled with almost the same type of fun and chaos, and most importantly, the long-awaited multiplayer feature! Does it live up to expectations? Somehow, but not quite.
Reaching For The Big Leagues
First thing’s first—there’s not much in the way of story in Cooking Simulator 2. It’s to be expected, as with most job-themed simulators—there’s a simple premise of you being an employee and manager of your own small restaurant, dreaming of making it big.
As your restaurant caters to customers daily, your restaurant’s reputation would soar as well. Improve your restaurant, experiment and unlock over 80 recipes, and bolster your restaurant into the big leagues!
Feels More Like Restaurant Simulator
Let’s get this out of the way—if you’re expecting the free reign, almost no-holds-barred chaos of the first game, it’s not here. While they’re centrally the same, CS2 is more controlled, more structured than it used to be. It’s not bad—just different, especially for those Cooking Simulator 1 (CS1) players looking for basically the same game but in multiplayer. Physics has been toned down a little for more control, which I personally find a type of good change. There’s also the lack of free-hand pouring, chopping, and all that, now replaced by a measuring system that lets you select the exact amount you need, or in terms of cutting up ingredients, you select what kind of cut you want from a circle menu and click according to the instructions.
Cooking Simulator 2 feels even more like a restaurant simulator than its predecessor. Aside from the main cooking simulation of it all, where you directly interact with the ingredients and chopping, blending, mixing, cooking them together and plating them for the customer, you are also expected to prepare ingredients ahead of time (both for cooking and for delivery—no more instantaneous deliveries like in CS1), slowly upgrade your equipment and restaurant, fulfill quests given by top chefs, and most of all, freely tweak and create the recipes you like.
That’s right, there’s the newly added Blueprint feature, where you can explore, change, and add steps and ingredients to existing recipes and sell them in your restaurant—just the way you like them. Want a Cheeseburger with extra cheddar cheese and extra mustard? Maybe even five slices of cheese? Or tweak the Garlic Shrimp into Breaded Garlic Shrimp? The possibilities are (almost) endless. Once you’ve got the hang of things, you can even make recipes from scratch.
Personally, I haven’t delved too much into the whole thing because the interface itself looks hellish and overwhelming—I’ve only added extra spices to my vegetables. However, if you get into the nitty-gritty of things, and the fact that you’re able to test these tweaked recipes to your heart's content in the comfort of your in-game apartment with unlimited ingredients…well, you might as well be stuck in the fun of creating something and tailoring something to your style.
Better Together Indeed
The age-old saying of "the more, the merrier" applies really well to CS2, which proudly wears its multiplayer feature on its sleeve. Apparent from its title, the game is definitely Better Together, even in gameplay.
You can definitely play solo, but the highlight of the game is definitely in its multiplayer aspect. I roped in another friend to play with…and the hilarity that ensued made my stomach hurt from laughing. Even at early stages, the game evidently ups the ante when you’re playing with another player or two. It’s a truly enjoyable experience, especially with the right people. Watch the chaos unfold as you and your ragtag squad try to serve all these prickly customers to the best of their ability…or not. Your call.
Fortunately, the co-op experience was pretty smooth sailing throughout, although there may have been a few instances where players were not seeing the same thing or visual assets were not loading properly, although it could be attributed to host connection problems instead.
Unintuitive Interface
With that said, there are a few things I wish they’d fix over time too, starting from the clunky, unintuitive UI. It’s…kind of all over the place, especially when looking at dish and recipe information. While you are able to check out individual portions and see how much spice was put into it, mixed dishes like soups and chopped salads don’t show exactly how much spice you put into the recipe until you pour it out and serve to the customer—which, by then, you can’t fix. That’s why I never seem to get the spice measurements for Gazpacho right, since I can’t check the information properly.
There is some info in their respective info boxes, but not all is shown, which makes dealing with soups and mixtures a little harder than it should be, since the ingredients would have already been mixed together.
In addition to that, dish information pop-ups also block other things on screen. Hovering over a dish or ingredient brings up a handy-dandy information menu that tells you how cooked it is, what spices it has, is it raw, and more. For cooked dishes and mixtures in particular, it covers up like half the screen, and sometimes, they’re even portioned weirdly. Why is the blended soup portioned—while in the pot—-into 500ML, 200ML, 50ML, and 25ML? Separately? It takes up unnecessary space just to say that it’s a lot of soup.
Bugs and Glitches Galore
Things don’t end there. Unfortunately, the game tends to freeze and glitch out in the middle of an action, sometimes even soft-locking you out of that particular step. For instance, this happened to me when I was trying to season a slice of mozzarella cheese as per the recipe instructions. The game froze, and the only action available was to cancel out of it—which then prevented me from actually seasoning the item.
Frustratingly, this has happened a few times, once even in the middle of a tutorial. This forces the player to reload a previous save—which, if you haven’t been saving after every dish or so (like I initially was), will make you redo the entire service phase again.
This also happens with actual recipe steps as well. A side of broccoli and cauliflower is listed to be seasoned twice with herbs and salt. However, the game won’t let me season it with salt after, defaulting to the pick-up item interaction instead. Because of the game’s bugs, I’m forced to take the fall for something I can’t do anything about.
Customers themselves are also glitchy at times, refusing to leave the establishment even after eating—or not even touching their food after it’s served. It counts as a completed order, but they will not get up and leave, which then soft-locks other customers from coming in.
Unfortunately, forcing them to leave counts as a merit against you, which is bad for progression. There was an instance in our multiplayer game where all three tables were full of bugged-out customers at 6PM in-game time…and it didn’t fix itself until the whole shift ended. Gosh, the loss in profits.
The bugs also appear to tread into the recipes themselves as well—the recipes you follow directly from the game, if I may add. The dish Broccoli Cream Soup just never seems to go past the Inedible (ouch) rating no matter what you do, because even a 0.24 portion of salt, pepper, and nutmeg is considered too much, even if the recipe explicitly states to add a certain amount of these spices.
Developer Big Cheese Studio appears to already be working on the bugs as detailed from their most recent post on their Steam page which is a good thing, but it’s a little disappointing to have these bugs, ranging from mildly annoying to game-breaking, be present in a game that’s supposedly in full release. Might as well have released it in Early Access for now.
Is Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together Worth It?
Maybe Wait For A Few More Patches
Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together tries to market itself as a more fun version, a more improved sequel of the original, but it falls flat in the face of its frustratingly wide variety of bugs that take away from the experience as a whole (I can’t count how many times I’ve had to reload the darn save file), as well as some unintuitive UI choices and mechanics.
However, it’s still decent to play if you like a more controlled, more structured version of CS1 with a bit of a new-ish flair, as well as the multiplayer aspect—the more the merrier is true here in CS2. Although, it would benefit from further polishing and patches to really show its true potential.
| Digital Storefronts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Steam |
||
| $24.99 | ||
FAQ
Where can you play Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together?
As of writing, Cooking Simulator 2: Better Together is only available to play on Steam.
Game8 Reviews
