Food Network: Cook or Be Cooked gives you a rather simple set of recipes and asks you to virtually cook them for your judges' (Mory and Susie) delight. The first recipe couldn't be simpler: bacon and eggs. It serves to introduce you to the game mechanics and teach you everything you need to know before you move on to more complex recipes. The recipes gradually get more complex, and you'll be making everything from seared tuna to baked lasagna. On that note, the unifying theme of the dishes in the game seems to be pretty simple, Americanized food. That doesn't stop them from being mouth-watering.
You receive points for almost everything you do, from peeling onions to opening cans. One thing that distinguishes this game from other cooking games is the fact that you have to time your cooking so that all the food in a dish arrives in front of the judges piping hot. This is the final area in a dish that you can receive points for, and often means the difference between a gold or a silver medal. Each main component of a dish has a timer that is displayed at the top left corner of the screen, which makes finishing a hot meal easier, but not completely foolproof.
Another thing that sets this cooking game apart from the rest is the fact that it actually makes you wait while things cook. Well, it actually doesn't force you to wait for water to boil and tuna to cook. You can fast forward cooking time with the press of a button. But if you really wanted to, you could wait for all of that to happen. This is a small feature of the game, but it really does make it feel like an authentic cooking experience. Since you have to wait for some items to cook, you can multi-task and take care of other things like prep work while you wait.
While you cook, Mory and Susie sometimes chime in with little facts or real-life cooking tips about the dish you're working on. For example, they may let you know that coriander is actually the seeds from the cilantro plant or that tuna does not need to rest before being cut. What they do most of the time, however, is tell you how well you did your last task like chopping garlic or washing potatoes. It's a little annoying, especially when you don't do anything that would actually affect a recipe's outcome in the real world. Chop an onion too slowly, and they'll groan about how they hope this will turn out alright. It can get pretty aggravating, especially when they criticize everything down to the way you punch in the time on a microwave. I could never figure out how to impress them with my microwave skills. It's very insulting, considering what a pro I am in real life.
Multiplayer modes in this game mirror the single player challenges. One mode has you compete side-by-side in a split-screen view. Each competitor works on the same recipe at the same time. Another mode, Hot Potato, has the two players pass the controls back and forth. This mode seems particularly unfair, as each player can be "stuck" with a low-scoring or high-scoring task, depending on where you are in the recipe when you swap. Of course, hardcore players of this game could memorize recipes and strategically stick the other player with the lower scoring tasks. If you know someone who takes cooking simulation to this kind of level, well, good luck, and... that sounds like a great time. Most, however, will find more fun with the split-screen mode that's a little more fair to the more casual player.
