Yes Chef: A veggie match-3 – Preview

You’d think the world has enough of the match-3 genre, à la Candy Crush. But when you repackage the format so beautifully, you cannot help but to get drawn in.

Yes Chef is a new title by Halfbrick Studios where you assist the young Cherry, who is hoping to learn new recipes for her restaurant. Mentored by the french Chef Pierre (who thankfully for her bears no resemblance to the irate Gordon Ramsay) she learns, as you do, how to maneuver in this environment. While the studio is well known for their Fruit Ninja game, this time, we will deal with veggies.

True to the match-3 genre, Cherry, aided by your fingers, need to make matches of 3 or more. You also get to level up your matching skills in some slightly RPG reminiscent fashion, yet not enough to truly be one. With the in-game money you reaped, you get also to buy power-ups; again, far from innovative for a game of this trend.

In most level, we are matching veggies up for the sole purpose of ranking up points, usually to achieve a specific goal in regards to them. Some other levels, again a match-3 classic, she has to unthaw “frozen” veggies by matching them to nearby tiles. In some levels she has to caters to her customers directly by providing her what they want: be it 4 bell peppers or 3 corns, which puts an interesting spin on the genre.

How engaging is the game? Well how can I explain it in layman’s terms… I started playing around 10 or 11 last night. Next thing you know it’s 1 am and I’m out of energy to keep playing (game energy mind you, I was ready to go all night!).

Needless to admit that this game is full of in-app purchases and even gives your some kind of bonus in that regards if you link your Facebook account. I declined that option because, as most of your agree, it’s not worth bothering your real life friends with a guilty pleasure of a game such as a match-3 one.

But I’ll admit freely that while there is only a little innovation on the match-3 genre here, this game is cute, well done, with a beautiful user interface. I’ll keep it in my frequently played game folder on my iPhone.