The saturated market of Battle Royale games continues to expand, with this week bringing eager survivalists an interesting take on the genre. Cuisine Royale, originally revealed as an April Fools joke, includes all the traditional ingredients of the battle royale recipe, but with a dash of culinary accoutrements. As its name suggests, Cuisine Royale's world is riddled with delicious food and cooking instruments. Much like your typical video game, the food the player finds all over the map can be consumed to provide healing. The cooking instruments, however, provide the more interesting departure from the typical battle royale model.
In Cuisine Royale, all the pots, pans, colanders, woks, and waffle irons you'll find around the map are worn as armor. A fully outfitted player is basically wearing everything but the kitchen sink by the time they're done. To add extra flair to this, each character goes through the whole game wearing nothing but underwear (which appears to have customize able patterns). Although the use of a kitchen instrument as armor isn't exactly a completely original idea, the mechanics built around the armor system in this game have more depth than one would expect. Each piece of armor covers and protects a specific part of the body. All that protection seems to come at a cost, though. The more pots and pans you're wearing, the louder and slower you are.
Besides the pots and pans, Cuisine Royale also brings some other interesting concepts into play. There are perk items the player can hold such as an IV bag, which grants slow health regeneration, or a cigar, which increases the player's health (because tough guys smoke cigars, right?). While none of these make or break a fight, it gives the player some freedom to play their way, which is always nice.
Cuisine Royale went into early access yesterday, and if it sounds interesting enough to try, now's a great time to pick it up, as it will be free on Steam until June 25th.
