Cuisine Royale has had a weird life. Having first come to inception as an April Fool’s joke, and then making the most of Xbox Game Preview before launching into the world as a fully fledged title, it’s been a game that has attempted to run a different Battle Royale route to the genre leaders. You see, no other game lets you go equipped with pots and pans like Cuisine Royale. Now though things are changing again and with a radical revamp in place, Cuisine Royale will now be known, going forward, as CRSED: F.O.A.D.
Pushed out via the latest update for the game, CRSED: F.O.A.D. standss for Cuisine Royale Second Edition: Fulfillment of All Desires with the latter half of that title working in the name of the tournament that players are fighting in. Honestly, we’re happy that Gaijin Entertainment and Darkflow Software decided to cut the name down a bit, if only to save our poor typing fingers from being worked to the bone.
Available for Xbox One, PS4 and PC, with native Xbox Series X|S and PS5 versions due to drop in the coming days, in CRSED: F.O.A.D., players get access to two new Champions – a voodoo practitioner from Haiti and a child of nature from Korea – a huge new map in the form of the Island of Siberia and access to a revamped progression and equipment system. The update brings forth a lot of new content and features too, like motorboats, shooting from moving vehicles, flamethrowers and mortars.
Alexander Polyakov, the lead game designer of Cuisine Royale, explains: “We think that the new title does a better job of expressing the idea of brutal last-man-standing battles where Champions with mystical powers fight“.
CRSED: F.O.A.D.’s metagame has also changed drastically from its time as Cuisine Royale. The new system works with free character rotation which allows players to try most of the Champions before choosing someone to focus on. Special character effects that influence the gameplay are now separated from the clothing pieces and are equipped independently. This allows the players to customize their character’s looks as creatively as possible without sacrificing battle efficiency. Two new types of mystical powers have been added to the game, which are equippable cooldown-based abilities and craftable hex bags (i.e. zombie-summoning grenades). Finally, the new battle pass system allows players to get cosmetic items, hex bag recipes, mystical scrolls, unique traps and rituals, summoning stones and other rewards by completing the pass tasks.
And further to all that, the aforementioned summoning stones are now used to unlock characters that include five existing CRSED: F.O.A.D. Champions and two new ones.
Character and map details as follows:
Louis “Bokor” Celine was born in Haiti to a family of police detectives and while still a kid discovered that he was destined to become houngan – a practitioner of voodoo magic. Louis fights in F.O.A.D. battles to sacrifice the souls of his competitors as repayment of his debt to the Loa spirits that helped the young houngan to save his mother from criminals. Louis has the ability to summon assault rifle wielding zombies that follow the houngan and attack his enemies.
The true origins of Sin “Huli” Yeou-bi are unknown. She was adopted as a child and was named after a character of a popular Korean cartoon about a shapeshifting fox. As a girl, she was not very talkative around other kids, but dogs understood her mood, fireflies surrounded her as she walked and any kids with which she quarreled were often stung by wasps and hornets. Friends, on the other hand, are so important to her, that she is ready to enter the F.O.A.D. ring to save them. Yeou-bi is able to summon a swarm of fireflies which spread throughout the area in search of enemies and reveal them.
The map called “Island of Siberia” (available in rotation with existing maps “Mexico”, “Summer Normandy” and “Winter Normandy”) offers 16 square kilometers of diverse landscape that can be explored for weeks while still finding new places. Here you stand near an ancient settlement, carved into the rock. Nearby you will find a fishermen’s village, half-submerged in water and mud. And look over there – a geyser field and even an active fire-breathing volcano. There are also some powerful USSR heritage war machines: concrete pillboxes, large hangars, and secret underground tunnels leading to the abandoned missile silo of an old military base. As well as the old infamous labor camps of Siblag. “Island of Siberia” is also full of waterways and is quite explorable by motorboats even without casting the Flood ritual.
As Cuisine Royale makes the switch to CRSED, we also find some DLC packs roll up onto the Xbox Store. With the base game free to play from the Xbox Store, the following will slurp up your cash should you let them…
- Age of Nagual Pack – £14.24
- Metal Zombie Pack – £16.74
- God of Thunder Pack – £16.74
- Biker Queen Pack – £16.74
- Holy Beast Pack – £8.39
- Holy Maiden Pack – £8.39
- Fire Dragon Pack – £16.74
Let us know what you think of this switch to CRSED: F.O.A.D.. Will it mean you spend a bit more time with the game? The comments are below.
