Space Food Truck Review

Space Food Truck is a game about traveling the universe cooking food and staying alive. This is as is usual with games something that involves a lot of risks and dangers. That said, it is doable on a first try if you're somewhat experienced with risk-management games.

You play as a crew of four, each with their own job on the ship. The engineer to repair and upgrade the ship, the chef to cook the ingredients, the scientist to research, and the captain to pilot the ship. You can be one of these in multiplayer, or all four in singleplayer. Either way, you're going to have to work together to get through things safely. With that said, it's not actually that hard, at least on normal difficulty. It's very forgiving and you can handle most things just fine unless you've messed up your card deck building.

Speaking of which, you handle your options through a card based system, with cards being your available actions and the fuel to use on these actions. In some cases litterally, with the captain's card to move the ship taking cards with power points to fill up the FTL engine. At the end of your turn, you have to buy a new card to add to your deck. As such, it is important to find ways to trim your deck, or you will be left with useless or lesser quality cards. Several ways to do this exist, and as such you can usually keep your deck under control.

Then there is the actual cooking. Gather ingredients, have the chef cook them up and then deliver the dish to its destination. It seems easy, but it can get a bit more complex. Some ingredients are much more rare, some need to be unlocked by the scientist. And then you have to actually get them cooking too, which again costs you time to find the right cards. After some time though, it begins to feel like everything is the same.

After some time though, it begins to feel like everything is the same. Very few things will ever change and in one or two playthroughs you will have likely seen everything it has to offer. You can stabilise safely and last almost endlessly as long as you have the right cards and did your deck work right. Science becomes mostly useless after they finish researching, and engineering turns into 'play all your cards to fix everything, end turn'. Especially if you play multiplayer, it may begin to feel like your turn is automated where the rest of the crew actually does things.

With a fitting graphical style, simple but functional animations, and what I would definitely say is above average humour with simple but not unthinking or boring gameplay, Space Food Truck rounds out to be a decent game with some replayability troubles. While I would certainly recommend it if it were half price, 20 euro is pretty steep for what you get out of it.