Food Truck Chef – Full Course Edition

If you’ve played games like Cooking Fever or Cooking Madness on your phone, Food Truck Chef: Full Course Edition will feel very familiar. This popular mobile title has now been ported to Steam, and most importantly, stripped of microtransactions and ads entirely. This has both pros and cons; see below.

On mobile, the game runs on two currencies: coins, earned by completing levels, and gems, which are harder to come by since you get them only when you level up. Gems serve a dual purpose: they can be spent to skip the wait time on upgrades (each upgrade takes around 30 minutes and costs 30 gems to rush), but they’re also required as part of the payment for tier 3 upgrades. This means that gems influence how fast you progress (waiting time until your upgrade is delivered) and how much you can upgrade a single piece of equipment. On Steam, all of this is bypassed: upgrades are instant, and there’s no gem economy to manage, which makes things a tad less complex.

The downside of not having a pay-to-win system anymore is that the mobile version lets you earn a 50% coin bonus after each level by watching an ad, and that’s gone from the Steam release. Since your progress is heavily tied to the upgrades you can afford with coins, removing that bonus will noticeably slow things down. Whether that’s a fair trade really depends on what bothers you more: the annoying ads and wait timers that are forced upon you, or a slower upgrade pace and progression.

As a rough value reference (approximate figures based on mobile store listings), the Steam version costs around $12.99, which is equivalent to buying 150 gems OR around 41,000 coins on mobile. Considering that rushing an upgrade costs 30 gems, that’s roughly five instant deliveries. The coins are harder to estimate, but possibly enough to cover half the available upgrades in the first restaurant. For comparison, the mobile No Ads Pack removes ads that play between levels (and only those, not the wait timers or gem costs), which are mandatory (cannot be skipped); this costs about half the price of the Steam version, and with this purchase, you also get a small amount of gems and coins.

Another difference between the mobile and the Steam versions is that live (global) events from the mobile version, like the Star Tournament and the Food Truck Festival, aren’t included in the Steam release anymore.

Content-wise, the game is pretty much what you would expect from the genre. There’s no story or narration. You follow Emily and her food truck across 19+ colorful street food locations, cooking everything from sushi and falafel to waffles and BBQ, and that’s pretty much it. The appeal is given by the cooking theme and the gameplay loop: take orders, prep yummy dishes under a timer, serve customers before their patience runs out, earn coins, upgrade your kitchen, rinse and repeat for the next location. With 800+ recipes and 700+ levels across a wide range of cuisines, you certainly won’t run out of things to do anytime soon.

The early levels at each location are rather easy, but the difficulty ramps up fast, and even though there’s a slight difference between the mobile and Steam versions regarding the target goals of levels (Steam’s are lower), to some extent, on Steam, it feels noticeably more hectic than on mobile (due to the lack of extra coins). Juggling multiple dishes while a large queue of hungry, impatient customers lines up is always quite stressful when you don’t have enough cooking appliances unlocked / upgraded, and honestly, that’s usually the point where I either hop to another location or simply abandon the game. Luckily, there are enough locations to keep things going for some time.

I’ve always preferred this kind of game on a bigger screen with a mouse, and this one is a rather decent port. No ads cutting into your flow, no waiting times. You just play, as much or as little as you want, with nothing slowing you down except your skill and the game’s increasingly demanding levels. My one real wish is for Steam achievements, which are oddly missing at launch despite being a feature in the mobile version. But if you enjoy casual management games and want something to unwind with that still keeps your fingers on fire, this is a solid pick.