Review: Battle Chef Brigade

Battle Chef Brigade is a fantastic, beautifully hand-drawn game made by Trinket Studios that I think deserves a spot on all of our Nintendo Switch consoles (or PC's, for those of you who don't have a Switch). Think Iron Chef meets Dungeons and Dragons meets Bejeweled, and you'll have Battle Chef Brigade. The game is about a girl, Mina Han, who lives in a land called Victusia where monsters are real, and overpopulating the earth and eating crops. The king of this land and his head chef had the idea to kill the monsters and use their body parts to make meals. This eventually turns into a tradition, where people come from all over the land to Brigade Town for a cooking competition to see which contestant is the best. Whoever wins the competition gets to become a Brigadier, one of the members of the elite Battle Chef Brigade. This is where Mina comes in. She is a young, aspiring chef hoping to be part of the Brigade, but is stuck cooking the same meals in her parents' restaurant. She eventually runs away from home and signs up for the contest.

The main feature of the game is the battles that take place (mostly) in the kitchen. If you go up to a NPC in the hub world, they may have a little prompt above their head telling you to hold a button to start a battle against them. The battles consist of going out of the battle kitchen through a portal that leads to different areas with different monsters in them. The forest area, for example, might have a dragon, while the cave area would have a hydra or a Lupir, which is a fox made out of flames. While the scenery is beautiful to take in, the hunting gets tedious at a point. Having to go back and forth constantly to get monster parts is one of the only annoying things in an otherwise great game. One of the other annoying things is just how much health some bosses have. The dragon, for example, has enough health that it took me about half the time that the game gave me for that round just to kill it.

Anyways, despite a few flaws, Battle Chef Brigade stands out as one of my top indie games of the year, and I would love to have an excuse, any excuse, to jump back into the world of Victusia and Mina Han.

9/10