Fantastic Chefs is Indian game studio 99Games’ newest game and just like Star Chef[1], it’s based in the world of cooking. Fantastic Chefs is a match-three game[2] except that you can match as many adjacent tiles in any direction as you want. This means that it’s easier to make huge combos but it may also dilute the experience by making the game too easy, if it’s not done well. We played over 60 levels of Fantastic Chefs to figure out if it’s the new Candy Crush Saga or yet another clone that doesn’t quite live up to its billing.
Before we speak about the gameplay, we’d like to mention the setting briefly. Yes, that’s right, Fantastic Chefs does have a bit of a back story. You start with one man who’s bored with his corporate job and he starts his own food truck. You can help him make fantastic dishes by collecting the ingredients he needs and levelling him up to increase his cooking speed.
Along the way, he meets several other chefs such as a ballerina who also cooks and a grandma who specialises in making pie. Each of these chefs has a special power such as blasting nearby ingredients to clear the path, turning all adjacent tiles into the same colour, and much more. You need to choose the right crew for each level and remember to level them up or risk getting stuck.
There are different areas such as Mysterious Pyramids, Charming Countryside, and Enchanting World that you unlock every 20 levels or so. New areas bring new challenges such as moving tiles or fungus, which you need to deal with while matching tiles of the same colour. Matching tiles is really simple — just drag...