Speed Crew is a decent attempt at turning Overcooked into a genre, but it lacks the charm and polish that made Overcooked beloved by millions.
Singleplayer.
Co-op Multiplayer.
Speed Crew, at its core, is an Overcooked-like, and as a result, it cannot escape being compared to the iconic franchise, and unfortunately, in the case of Speed Crew, that is a bad thing.
While Speed Crew is a decent game and falls short in no single area to a damning degree, it is all around a less polished and less interesting game than Overcooked and Overcooked 2, and while it may appeal to racing enthusiasts more than culinary focused Overcooked, there is very little about Speed Crew that warrants playing it when Overcooked 2 costs just a few dollars more.
While Speed Crew is coming to PC, the developers opted to launch first on the Nintendo Switch, which is curious considering that games are developed on PC.
A PC release often comes before a console launch, especially when the game appears to have been unfinished, with some elements, such as arcade mode, being designated as “coming soon” when it originally launched onto the Nintendo Switch.
While Speed Crew has a campaign that can be played solo, games like Speed Crew and Overcooked are tedious when played alone, as they have been designed to be played cooperatively with other players, and this, when combined with repetitious gameplay and relatively poor sales, makes Speed Crew very difficult to recommend to anyone who does not have a ready-made friend group to play with, due to its almost non-existent online multiplayer community.
The Speed Crew forum on Steam has just five posts not made by the developers and less than a dozen posts in total, indicating that there is very little demand or interest in a game that is essentially a less polished version of Overcooked with a new coat of paint.
What Ukraine is currently going through makes game development very difficult. However, as much as I admire the Ukrainian people and support their fight against
Russian aggression, Speed Crew is just not impressive enough to warrant anything more than a passing grade.
While the developers have tried to include as many races as possible due to players being forced to play as preset characters, there is very little room for diversity and expression, with players being forced to choose one of the following four player models.
While it’s nice to see a black female character in a prominent role, I cannot help but notice that many race/gender combinations are missing, and allowing players to create their character by choosing a body type, preset face, hairstyle, and skin tone, would have been a vast improvement, even at the expense of Speed Crew’s fully voiced narrative cutscenes, which while high quality does little to make Speed Crew more appealing to a wider demographic.
Speed Crew is a management video game developed and published by Wild Fields, it was released on 8 June 2023 and retails for $19.99.
Speed Crew is available on the following platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
Speed Crew offers the following matchmaking options:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Speed Crew is rated PEGI 3+ and contains no offensive content.
Speed Crew is a decent game if you love Overcooked games; however, loving Overcooked 1 & 2 implies you own or have at least played them extensively; because of this, Speed Crew will feel like a step backwards, making it impossible for me to recommend.
