Gourmet Warriors Review

Gourmet Warriors is set in an alternative setting where World War III has come and gone and decimated the planet. As the citizens of Zeus Heaven Magic City try to recover from the devastation, Bath, a secret organization bent on causing strife and violence, is growing their power every day. It’s up the player as one of three protagonists (or two of three if you play with a friend) to save Zeus Heaven Magic City and its inhabitants.

First released in 1995 for the Super Famicom in Japan, Gourmet Warriors is a typical classic 16-bit side-scrolling beat’em up where players, as one of the three heroes, Bonjour, Mademoiselle or Très Bien, you beat up everyone in your path to reach the level’s boss and then move on to the next area. You can punch, run, jump and jump kick your way through the opposition.

One of the interesting quirk of this game, as opposed to other beat’em ups, is that dead enemies will drop vegetables that’ll you pick up. While other items will give you an instant health refill, the vegetables are used in between each level. You’ll asked to cook meals with two ingredients and based on the resulting meal, you’ll earn a health refill. You also have only one life, so when you die, it’s over. Thankfully, there’s a continue option that will let you restart from the area where you die… unless you reboot/quit the game.

The game looks great; it looks and feel like the classic beat’em ups from the 90s. Each level has a different style to it offering a different setting to avoid environment repetition. The three protagonists are uniquely designed and feel different. Enemy variety is definitely interesting; bosses are also quite unique. The soundtrack is interesting as best, but also quite forgettable and easily drowned out as you focus your energies on beating people up.

While there isn’t anything majorly wrong here, there are a few nuisances. For starters, the combat. It’s is barebone and simply a single button mashing affair. Even Final Fight feels like it has more depth than this. Also having to get through 2 menus before starting the game is annoying. They are treating this as some of their past bundles of games where you need to “select” the game before jumping in the game… but there’s only one here.

Gourmet Warriors is a shallow, very limited experience that hasn’t aged all that well. While it’s excusable in the 90s to have shallow gameplay/combat, it’s hard to justify this nowadays given that we’ve been spoiled with deeper combat experiences such as Fight N’ Rage among others. If you crave a classic, challenging old school experience, you could do worst than Gourmet Warriors but if you’re looking for a more meaty experience, this is not the one you’re looking for.