Overcooked 2, one of friendship's greatest trials, has been besieged by undead snacks in the new DLC, Night of the Hangry Horde. Instead of putting these rotting peppers and mouldy slices of bread in the bin, you'll have to feed them delicious meals so they don't turn their attention towards you. 

To feed the waves of vengeful food, you'll be able to use a guillotine—for chopping ingredients, not necks—and a coal furnace. With them, you'll be able to prepare soups, fruit pies and roast dinners, which hopefully the undead will agree are much tastier than brains. 

Feeding these zombies will also net you coins that you can use to repair the castle and unlock shortcuts around the kitchen. This is what happens when you build a restaurant in a crumbling old castle. Sure, it sounds like a cool location, but you're going to end up spending all your money on renovating it. I've watched real estate shows. 

Accompanying the new modes are four new chefs—ghost, vampire, werewolf and a guy with a cardboard box on his head—along with nine new themed kitchens and three hidden kitchens. That's on top of the eight kitchens you get with the horde mode. So many opportunities to have arguments with friends. 

Chris Schilling called it an entertaining but familiar sequel in his Overcooked 2 review, but the new mode sounds pretty novel. Some of the other modes have been a bit gimmicky, but this seems more than one-note. 

Night of the Hangry Horde is on Steam and GOG for £8/$10.

Overcooked 2's latest DLC, Campfire Cook Off, is out now and you check out the co-op chaos for yourself in the trailer above.

Campfire Cook Off introduces 15 new levels with 12 new camping-related kitchens, new chefs, new recipes, and additional 'wood chopping' and backpack mechanics. If you've played the game at all, I think you'll agree that those all sound like excellent new ways to get mad at your co-op partner. 

Overcooked 2's Campfire Cook Off is available now via Steam. If you haven't given the game a try, the base game is enjoying 30 percent discount until April 22, so now seems like as good a time as any to pick it up.

Overcooked 2, the game of co-op cooking and losing friends, is celebrating the Chinese New Year with a free update. Seven new kitchens, pig and dragon chefs, and new recipes have been flung into the game, available now. Feast your eyes on the trailer above. 

Despite being, in my experience, quite a stressful game, creating a tasty fruit platter or hot pot—the aforementioned new recipes—in a tranquil koi pond sounds lovely, and I'm sure there's no chance of arguments or chefs falling out. 

On top of the New Year festivities, Overcooked 2's also introducing a new mode. Survival mode tasks chefs with making the most dishes possible in the time allotted, with each dish you serve netting you more seconds and letting you keep cooking until your body and brain both give out and you can no longer tell the difference between soup and steak. Survival mode is available for all levels, including those from seasonal updates and DLC. 

In our Overcooked 2 review, Chris Schilling thought it was, once again, a great multiplayer romp, but a bit too safe, feeling like an expansion more than a sequel. Still, free updates are always nice, and maybe all of this extra stuff helps it to stand on its own legs. 

Friendship-destroying cooperative game Overcooked 2 is receiving an extra course of content, in the form of New DLC Surf ‘n’ Turf.

The above launch trailer shows off the DLC's new features, all of which are themed around the new exotic location. Players will be cooking up a storm in new tropical-themed kitchens, basting on beaches, roasting on rickety rafts, and, ah, juicing in jungles (I'm so sorry).

The DLC adds 12 new campaign levels in total, as well as new Versus and "Kevin" levels. It also introduces new chefs, including a mildly terrifying anthropomorphic parrot, and a bunch of new recipes such as kebabs and smoothies, the latter of which you’ll need to use a blender to create.

The DLC launches alongside a free New Game + update. This adds a bunch of new features and improvements, including level previews on the game’s world map, the ability to change chefs in the pause menu, and the addition of a fearsome “Expert” difficulty star, just in case you found the game too relaxing on other difficulties.

Vanilla Overcooked 2 released back in August, scoring a respectable 78. PC Gamer contributor Chris Schilling described it as “one of the most intensely stressful games you’ll ever play”, which makes it sound like a pretty accurate kitchen simulator. Seriously, why would anyone want to be a chef? It looks horrible. Why would you want to do a job in which fire and shouting are two of its key features?

Anyway, Overcooked 2’s Surf ‘n’ Turf DLC is available as of 5pm BST today, letting you enjoy another slice of stress-induced verbal abuse from your friends and family.

Ghost Town Games' co-op kitchen 'em up is here to ruin friendships once again. Overcooked 2 arrives today on PC, and comes with a launch trailer. 

Dinner is served:

According to this community post, Overcooked 2 unlocks on Steam today at 9am PST / 5pm BST. It brings with it 47 levels, 16 chefs, nine core recipes with "many different variations", and a new storyline.

Chris Schilling bills Overcooked 2 as a "safe but solid" sequel, suggesting it often feels more like an expansion than a follow-up. Nevertheless, he speaks fondly of it throughout his 78-scored review, and I just love this opening paragraph: 

Like the original, Overcooked 2 is a cheerful, non-violent co-op game that’s simple enough for the whole family to enjoy. It also happens to be one of the most intensely stressful games you’ll ever play. This sequel adds a generous helping of new ingredients, but at its core it’s the same game: one that, for all its fantastical elements and willfully counter-intuitive working environments, captures the pressure-cooker tension of a busy restaurant kitchen. And it’s undoubtedly the only multiplayer game where you might hear one of your fellow players barking at you to 'pass the sodding lettuce'. 

I'm not convinced I'd be as polite as Chris there, particularly after reading Evan's kitchen calamities alongside PCG's Tim, Bo, and Jarred. Beneath Overcooked 2's charming wrapper is a brutal co-op romp, says Evan, who seems equal parts exhausted and entertained by the end of that feature.

More information can be read on Overcooked 2's Steam page. There, it costs £19.99/$24.99.

No game has produced more laughter mixed with yelling in the PC Gamer office than Overcooked. The four-player arcade game about cooking under pressure was one of our favorites games of 2016 because it delivered something pleasant and tough in a genre that's underserved on PC, the same-screen co-op game. Overcooked 2's biggest new feature, online multiplayer, breaks the series out of that shell. 

Playing it with Tim, Bo, and Jarred on our team, I was glad that getting friends into an online session is smooth and straightforward, considering how often smaller studios struggle with building matchmaking and lobby systems. You can jump into standalone levels or plow through the host player's story campaign together. I was surprised that there's even a public online play option, which matches you with whoever might be queued with you. There's no "estimated wait time" indicator here, as you'd find in big multiplayer games like Rainbow Six Siege, but having at all is an upgrade. 

Other than online multiplayer, Overcooked 2 mostly reads as a box of fresh, interesting levels, rather than a reinvention of the game. That's welcome. Some of the mid-campaign stages available in the incomplete build I played were more taxing than the the first Overcooked's final boards. On a later level where we had to bake chocolate cake and pancakes on an alien planet, our group managed a profit of five coins. For comparison, a typical success might earn several hundred. 

This stage is calamitous—thin paths of alien terrain rise out of a green lake the whole level is sat in, then submerge themselves every 15 or 20 seconds before rising up again with different shapes. Each of us at one or multiple points drowned trying to ferry eggs or chocolate across the screen. It's evident in stages like this that Overcooked 2 raises the skill ceiling, map complexity, and recipe complexity, and ramps up the difficulty quicker than the previous game on the assumption that you've played it.

On a lower-difficulty stage, our hot air balloon burger kitchen, manageably on fire (my only explanation is that Melissa McCarthy is the entrepreneur behind these restaurants) eventually fell from the sky and crashed into a sushi shop lined with conveyor belts. In another instance, two static, wooden docks begin to shift and float down a river halfway through the round as the water level rises, forcing you to use the new throwing mechanic to move ingredients in the final two minutes.

These level transformations are a new gimmick, and when one triggers, you sort of just freeze and wait for it to end, like an earthquake, except you still have to figure out how to make three kinds of sushi in the aftermath. I like them as generous visual showcases, but they're also really disorienting. Having to take in a new set of recipe combinations, cooking stations, and hazards with about two minutes left on the clock exhausts my brain more than hours of a competitive FPS. 

I respect that Overcooked 2 isn't shy about pouring on the difficulty, but I like Overcooked least when a stage feels like it's more about surviving and avoiding hazards than it is about outputting lots of meals. I also tend to play Overcooked with people who don't consider themselves everyday gamers, so hopefully the final game will have a healthy set of levels that don't require me to talk my friends and family through "What to do when the burger restaurant explodes and we enter the center of the Earth." The tumult of these map transformations makes me wonder whether it'd be improved at all by an announcer, but that would undercut the of miscommunication, arguing, and laughing that tends to arise on tough maps, and that's half the fun.