Overcooked 2 tips and tricks can make the difference between victory and defeat. This article covers eight of the best ways to win.

Overcooked 2 is a fantastic game which should appeal to fans of cooking, simulation games, and fast-paced action games equally. Unfortunately, this isn't an easy game to get the hang of, so we have rounded up a number of Overcooked 2 tips to help you succeed.

A Brief History of the Overcooked Series

If you're a fan of simulation games, then you've probably heard of the Overcooked series. The first Overcooked originally came out in August 2016. Fast-forward to two years later, and Overcooked 2 arrived on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.

Overcooked 2 is a frantic cooking simulation game that offers co-op and competitive play. It's packed with insane kitchens full of various obstacles and hazards. Players must rapidly prepare different recipes and fulfill customer orders within a time limit.

Overcooked 2 is a crazy cooking game for everyone, especially when playing with friends (or strangers) through the local co-op or online multiplayer. The following tips will help you win at Overcooked 2 before Overcooked 3 inevitably gets released!

1. Delegate Tasks to All Players

In Overcooked 2's single-player campaign, you control two chefs in the kitchen by constantly switching between them (with the L or R triggers on consoles). While it gets difficult switching back and forth for different kitchen tasks, you at least get complete control over what's happening.

Overcooked 2 Strategy Delegate Tasks

As you play with up to three other people, things get a bit harder to manage, especially when you and your friends choose similar-looking chefs. With the brand new Overcooked characters like the mouse, eagle, octopus, beaver, unicorn, and platypus, you hopefully won't confuse your chefs.

Overcooked 2 is all about working together to get orders out. To maximize efficiency, everyone playing should study the layout of each Overcooked level, and then take charge of a task. Or delegate one person as the manager and have them assign tasks.

For example, it's efficient to have one person gather ingredients, while another is in charge of chopping and tenderizing. In the meantime, someone else cooks and plates, and the last person serves and clean dishes. If you have fewer than four people, then everyone may have more than one task to do.

Some stages have kitchens that move around every so often, so that's another important factor to keep in mind. This causes the layouts to change, so players also need to adapt to these changes and switch roles instantly if necessary.

2. Watch Your Pots and Pans

Once a pot or pan has ingredients in it and is over the burner, it starts cooking. If a pot or pan stays on the burner for too long, it will start a fire---so make sure you're watching them. An exclamation mark and audible warning begin after a few moments, which is helpful when the kitchen is chaotic.

Overcooked 2 Strategy Fire Prevention

The cooking timer gets delayed once you add another ingredient, so if you're making soup and it's about to burn, just toss in another ingredient to reset the timer. If there are no ingredients available, just take the pot or pan off the burner and place it on the counter. It stops cooking but picks up where it left off once replaced.

If you do let a pot or pan burn, it causes a fire that spreads quickly. To put it out, grab the fire extinguisher (there's always one around) and use the action button to put out the flames. You can't use burned utensils until you "toss" them out, which means taking them to the garbage disposal and emptying out the burnt contents.

It's important to note that cooking is always the longest process in the kitchen. Because of this, it's always recommended to have at least two dishes (if not more) cooking at once, so everything's ready to go when needed.

3. Toss Ingredients

The first Overcooked requires you to walk your ingredients across the entire kitchen in order to pass it on to another cook. Fortunately, Overcooked 2 does away with this time-consuming task---you can now toss your ingredients directly to your fellow chefs, instead of just throwing them on the ground.

In some Overcooked levels (like the one below), you're forced to throw food. Some kitchens are permanently split for the entire level, so you'll have to make do.

Overcooked 2 Strategy Throw Ingredients

Whip your tomatoes, chicken legs, and hamburger patties to the chef (or into the pan) on the other side of the kitchen using X on Nintendo Switch, Y on Xbox One, and Triangle on PS4. Try your best to aim the ingredient at another chef. Otherwise, it'll fall to the floor and the other chef will waste time picking it up.

Keep in mind that the throw button is the same as your cut button. When you're ready to cut, be sure to stand right in front of the cutting board, or you'll end up accidentally throwing an ingredient.

4. Scoop Out Rice and Use Buns as Plates

Luckily, you don't need Overcooked cheats to get through a tough level---you need a strategy. And sometimes, that strategy isn't something you'd normally do in real life.

You'd think that when the rice's done, you should pour the contents onto a plate. But this involves taking the pot off the burner, and then you have to put it back before proceeding with another task.

Overcooked 2 Strategy Rice Scooping

It's easier to take a plate up to the pot, and use the plate to "scoop" out the rice and serve it. This way, the pot stays on the burner, ready for another batch of rice. The same goes for soup and pasta.

On stages where you make burgers, sometimes plates aren't ready for cooked patties. Since the game's burgers all have buns, players can place cooked patties into buns themselves and have them resting on the counter until a plate's available.

This Overcooked strategy definitely isn't sanitary, but it works. It applies to tortillas and rolled pizza dough as well.

5. Split Up Ingredients

As mentioned earlier, some stages will cut you off from the ingredient, chopping, or cooking areas. For these kitchens, it's important to make sure that you have something to work on at all times.

Overcooked 2 Strategy Split Ingredients

In order for this to happen, you may have to throw some raw or chopped ingredients onto the floor in a specific sector of the kitchen, or into another chef's hands. This way, the cook in that part of the kitchen can get some work done too.

Again, these are not sanitary kitchens, but you have to do whatever it takes to get as many orders out as possible.

You should also make sure that dirty dishes get into the sink area. While one chef cooks, another can wash up the plates.

6. Stack Dirty Plates

Speaking of dirty plates, there's a more efficient way of dealing with them. When you serve a dish, a dirty plate comes back after a few moments once the customer's done eating.

Overcooked 2 Strategies Dirty Dishes

Judging by the flow of the kitchen, you may think it's logical to take that single dirty dish to the sink, wash it, then place it on the counter near the cooking area. However, players are able to stack dirty plates together, then take them to the sink to clean. This can be a time saver, as you are moving one stack of plates rather than making multiple trips back and forth.

7. Go With the Flow

Sprinting is incredibly useful in the kitchen, as well as when traversing the world map. Pressing the sprint button (Circle on PS4, B on Xbox One and Nintendo Switch). allows your truck or cook to dash forward in a straight line, so it's great for saving time.

Overcooked 2 Strategy Sprinting

But be careful when sprinting in the kitchen. If you slam into another cook, it pushes them back quite a bit and may cause chaos, so use it with caution.

In the above screencap, you can see that Overcooked 2 also introduces moving walkways. Since these walkways only move in one direction, you need to make sure that you walk on them in the direction that their arrows point. Walking with the current will give you a brief speedup, while walking against it will slow you down immensely.

Another Overcooked strategy that you should master is cutting up food while a counter shifts. To do this, players must move against the direction of the counter while holding down on the action (cut) button. This way, you don't waste a second.

8. Pay Attention to Customer Patience

Just like real life, the customers in Overcooked 2 have their own level of patience when it comes to waiting for their food.

In each kitchen, orders from customers come in along the top of the screen. This tells you exactly what they want, whether it's sushi, pasta, fries, salad, fried chicken, or whatever. At the top of the order is a colored bar. This indicates the customer's patience, and it's vital to pay attention to it.

Overcooked 2 Strategy Customer Patience

As you'd expect, each one starts off green when it's a new order. The bar will gradually decrease, becoming yellow, then orange, and finally red when time for that order is about to expire.

Cooks should focus their attention on orders that are not about to run out of time. Once the patience for an order is gone, it's dropped. This means instead of wasting your resources in filling that order that won't even matter, it's more efficient to work on other orders that have enough time left.

Get Cooking With These Overcooked 2 Tips

While Overcooked 2 may seem like a silly cooking game at first, it's one of those simple games that are surprisingly deep.

Overcooked 2 Strategy Time's Up

The later stages get crazy. You'll encounter haunted swamps, lightning storms, and even teleportation portals. It's the variety of Overcooked 2 that makes this a worthy successor to the original Overcooked---not to mention that it's unlike any cooking simulation that you've played before.

There are several ways to get better at video games, but hopefully these Overcooked 2 tips and tricks will help you succeed in those insane kitchens. Even if you aren't good at the game, it's still a ton of fun to play with family and friends.

If you love playing Overcooked on the Switch, you should check out the best Nintendo Switch games money can buy. And for more frantic gaming fun, check out the best speedruns that you can learn from.