Good Pizza, Great Pizza - Cooking Simulator Game

Introduction

TapBlaze's pizzeria sim has had an unusually long runway to get here. It launched on iOS in December 2014 and Android in early 2015 as a free-to-play follow-up to the studio's My Pizza Shop, spent June 2018 to January 2023 in Steam Early Access, and only now carries the tacked-on subtitle "Cooking Simulator Game" — a recent storefront rename that nudges it toward search traffic rather than describing anything new in the build. Across that decade it picked up over 250 million downloads on mobile, a Nintendo Switch release, and, as of this year, a coffeehouse spin-off called Good Coffee, Great Coffee. This is a game that has been quietly popular for a very long time, which makes its Steam page — currently marketing itself as an "asmr-friendly," "cozy" escape — a strange fit for what the review section actually describes: a fast, sometimes frantic multitasking game that gets genuinely stressful once the topping list fills the screen.

Gameplay

The loop is simple to state and surprisingly deep in practice. A customer walks up, states an order, and it's rarely a plain list of toppings — regulars speak in riddles, inside jokes and non-sequiturs the player has to translate into an actual pizza. A kid mid-math-test rattles off an equation instead of a topping count; a nostalgic customer describes a pie by a memory instead of an ingredient. Reading the joke correctly and building the pizza that answers it is the whole appeal, and it's a much better hook than the straightforward "assemble this exact order" formula that powers most of the genre. TapBlaze's own listing claims over a million possible order combinations across 300-plus named customers, and even discounting marketing rounding, the variety in player accounts backs it up — it's one of the few things almost no review, positive or negative, complains about.

Where the loop strains is pace. As the topping bench grows across five story chapters, orders stack up faster than a new player can parse them, and several long-time players describe the same arc: charmed for the first few hours, then increasingly buried under simultaneous tickets with no larger toolkit to cope. TapBlaze's answer is automation — the "Topping Buddies" and similar staff-management upgrades that hand off repetitive prep — but as covered below, those upgrades sit behind the game's steepest prices, which turns a pacing problem into a monetisation one for anyone who doesn't want to grind for the coin.

Story and presentation

Five chapters, five rival chefs, one antagonist (Alicante) running through the whole arc, and a recurring cast — including two homeless characters who return the favour if helped early — give the game more narrative spine than its "casual" Steam genre tag suggests. A running news-parody segment, Pizza News Network, spoofs 24-hour cable news with pizza-world headlines, and it's the kind of small, unnecessary bit that developers only keep polishing across a decade of updates if players are actually reading it. The character art is the clearest standout: expressive, varied and specific enough that it won NYX Game Awards 2024 gold for PC visual art and character design, and it's easy to see why — a cast built around funny, memorable faces is exactly what an order-riddle game needs to land its jokes.

Progression and the late game

Progression runs on the pizzeria's own economy — profits fund ingredient variety, shop upgrades and decor — layered under the five-chapter story arc. It holds up early and gets rockier late: several of the more detailed reviews describe the final two chapters as noticeably more tedious than the build-up, with order complexity outpacing the tools the player has to manage it. Steam's own achievement data backs up a real drop-off in how far players actually push into the game — the most commonly earned achievements sit in the high-30% range of the player base, while a long tail of harder achievements clears under 5%, several under 1%. That's a normal shape for a game with a soft difficulty ramp, but it lines up with the specific complaint in the reviews: the game is easiest to love in its first few hours and hardest to love by its last.

Monetisation — the actual headline

This is the section that decides the score, because it's the section nearly every recent Steam review leads with. Good Pizza, Great Pizza is free on iOS and Android. The Steam edition costs US$9.99 (roughly NZ$14.75), and TapBlaze's own storefront copy calls it "the premium PC edition... no ads, just a comfy, complete experience." What it doesn't mention there is that the build still ships the mobile game's diamond currency, still prices quality-of-life upgrades against it, and sits alongside a genuinely startling 49 pieces of paid cosmetic DLC — pizzeria "sets" like the Cyber Pizzeria pack, priced around US$7 each, nearly the cost of the base game per set. Steam's own storefront tags the game "In-App Purchases" despite the up-front price.

The player-review record is unusually consistent on this, across years and across positive and negative verdicts alike: buyers expected paying up front to mean the shop went away, and it didn't. "Buying the game on Steam doesn't remove in game purchases," reads one representative review; another opens a positive write-up with "WARNING: DO NOT BUY ANYTHING WITH REAL MONEY," describing a purchased item vanishing after a progress reset. The complaint isn't that the diamond shop exists — a decade-old mobile game is always going to have one somewhere in its DNA — it's that Steam buyers paid specifically to leave it behind and didn't get to. For a genre-adjacent readership that gets burned by mobile monetisation more than most, this is the single fact worth knowing before a purchase.

Interface

The UI is a straightforward scale-up of a phone screen rather than a redesign for mouse and keyboard: menus, shop screens and the tutorial flow all read as ported rather than rebuilt, and more than one review flags the same tutorial gaps — an option to enter matches with no clear explanation of what to do first. It's functional, and the core pizza-building screen itself works well with a mouse, but the surrounding shell rarely lets you forget it started life on a 6-inch screen.

Final verdict

Strip away the storefront and Good Pizza, Great Pizza is a genuinely well-made order-puzzle cooking sim with ten years of iteration behind its jokes, its pacing and its cast — that pedigree shows, and it's why the Steam rating still sits at Very Positive despite everything below. But a paid PC release that keeps its mobile game's diamond shop, prices its most useful upgrades against that shop, and layers nearly fifty cosmetic DLC packs on top isn't "the complete edition" its own marketing claims to be. Buy it on a sale, for the writing and the art, and go in with your expectations set on a mobile game rather than a from-scratch PC one.