Some foods, frankly, just need to be trashed. I can't count the number of times I've tried to make the perfect eggs Benedict and had Gordon Ramsay-esque invective come out of my mouth. The eggs are poached and ready to go, but when it comes time to serve, my brain freezes under pressure and before I know it, I've served it without the herbs on top. The recipient is disappointed. Now that I think about it, it is very similar to when I try to cook in real life.

Unlike the previous two games in the series, where the mission was to create the restaurant of your dreams, this time you are on a journey. The game opens with a pair of eerily friendly robots pulling you out of the wreckage of the Terragon Super Tower. The robots quickly provide a van, and you are transformed into a food truck, performing a major comeback on your way to the Iron Cook competition.

Play is broken up into "days" of about 10 minutes each, in which you visit several stops to serve food. At each stop, guests order from a pre-prepared menu of dishes, which are served from stations located at the top of the screen. Between these stops, you not only have to replenish your holding for preparation, but also cook special orders coming from different sections of the menu. It's a bit of a Mad Max situation as other foodies sporadically attack your truck, destroying your food stockpile base and forcing you to deviate from your planned route.

Each food item has a difficulty rating from 0 to 5, and on many days a point system applies. The result is surprisingly strategic, forcing a balance of difficulty between the two sections of the menu. This is true even before taking into account the number of servings produced in each batch and the shelf life of the various dishes once prepped. Special orders tend to require more work per meal, but orders can only be placed at a certain point, and their number is limited by the amount of prep stations equipped on the truck. Regular orders can be served from a holding station for any number of items at a time. In particular, your handy robotic companion will serve all orders that are ready to go at a moment's notice with a tap of the Ctrl key, but they must be refilled periodically, even during stops. If you give too much priority to special orders, you'll end up on the back foot at each stop; if you give too much importance to regular orders, you'll tie yourself up trying to keep all the plates spinning.

The difficulty of the dishes is not particularly consistent. Beef Wellington, for example, ranks fourth, despite involving a relatively simple one-step process and little variation in ordering. Poutine, on the other hand, has to perform a second assembly process amidst the chaos of service and receives only one point. However, once he learns the four buttons, he can assemble the seafood fry combo in one step." this is rank 3. The

buttons are sometimes tricky, too. Ingredients are mapped to various letter keys, which usually correspond fairly clearly to the word in question. However, the keys for certain ingredients are not always consistent from dish to dish. While I suppose it is inevitable sometimes, it is especially frustrating when two plates are similar and require different keys to add the bun on top, for example, a beef burger and a chicken burger. Sure, you can remap the buttons for each item, but by default it's a source of frustration.

Advancing the road trip opens up the option to upgrade the truck. Adding more prep stations would serve more customers and increase daily sales, but would require more labor to maintain them. On the other hand, adding holding stations would provide more storage space for prepped food, and heat lamps would help keep food fresher longer.

Believe me, the old bunkers need as much equipment as they can cram in. Each stop is a frantic whirlwind, and panic grows with the crowds seeking lunch. A single keystroke can ruin the entire holding's food supply. If things get a little too much, there is an option to switch to "chilled" mode at the beginning of each day.

The game also does not punish this excessively harshly. The only penalty is that you will be maxed out on silver medals for the day. I missed the added spice of a pressure environment and the adrenaline rush that comes with it, though.

In the grand scheme of things, we often have to settle for a silver medal due to the rather severe difficulty of CSD3. To win a gold medal, you have to have a perfect day, but if you serve 200 perfect dishes and just one dish is under-seasoned or over-seasoned, you may be disappointed.

Still, it is a testament to the persuasive power of CSD3 that you will want to keep fiddling with the menu to find the perfectly optimized dish. With over 200 dishes from around the world, from empanadas to escargot, boiled eggs to bunny chow, there is no shortage of combination possibilities. As tasty as a tube of Pringles, it's fun to play as a little snack or as a complete banquet.