411Mania writes: "The casual gaming market has been steadily growing over the past few years and one of the companies that has taken advantage of this trend is Big Fish Games. With hits like Dinner Dash, Farm Frenzy, Cooking Dash and Cake Mania among others, they have established themselves as one of the premier publishers in the PC casual gaming market. Enter Top Chef, based on the popular cooking show of the same name (that airs on Bravo) which combines good memorization skill and time management to provide an addictive experience."
Casual Gameplay writes: "The world of professional cooking is ugly, friends. Forget your Martha Stewarts, your Rachel Rays, your semi-homemade with matching-table-decor. It's hard, it's hot, and it is really, really competitive. Top Chef is based on Bravo Channel's reality program of the same name, which takes a batch of fifteen confident up-and-coming chefs and eliminates them through a series of culinary challenges each week until only one remains. The game puts you in the shoes of one such aspiring chef and, with your help, she's going to chop, saute, and julienne her way to the top through fifteen episodes and a whopping forty-five challenges. Along the way she'll have to deal with sneaky behavior, backstabbing, and some furious competition, but trust me; that's the easy part about being a Top Chef."
For what it's worth, this is a much more solid "cooking" game than Hell's Kitchen: The Game. In Top Chef, you actually have to think about what ingredients you'd like to put together. Still, the pace is so frenetic at times that you feel like you're just throwing things into a pot and hoping they'll stick. Top Chef: The Game is an interesting diversion at best, but if you want to learn to cook, you'd be far better off just buying a cookbook.
Presentation - 7.0
Graphics - 6.5
Sound - 5.0
Gameplay - 6.5
Lasting Appeal - 6.0
Overall -
GameZebo: "Top Chef brings a number of great new ideas to the cooking game genre. Perhaps if the developer gave us a cookbook, explicitly letting us know exactly what flavor each ingredient was, and a glossary of combinations, things would be much clearer. As it stands, Top Chef is a smorgasbord of potential, but the finish is a little off."
