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Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure Just How Free Is It?

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Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure Title Screen

You know how most free to play games are nowadays. You get to play for a while and then they hit you with incentives to make in-app purchases to keep playing. At this point, 2 things may happen. Either you quit playing or you spend that $10 to continue. Question is, is Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure like that?

The Basics of Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure

Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure is a simulation game made by CatLab Interactive. It is a free to play game food truck simulator game on google play store.

The basis of the game is that you run a food wagon, traveling to different cities of your choice to become rich. Rats are your chefs. Heroes defeat monsters for ingredients that are required to cook recipes.

This is the food wagon screen where you tell the rats what to cook and change your menu.

Of course, eating dishes made from monsters does not sound appetizing to me, so I named my food wagon Eat If You Dare. Despite the name, people are flocking to the food wagon.

It’s not a complicated story but it can be addicting. In fact, while writing, I started the game to reference some information for this post and I ended up playing it for 30 minutes before I came back to my writing.

There are no story levels or a world map where you must complete a goal or puzzles to move on. There are no limited lives or tries. So why is this important? Because that means there is no stamina limit.

No Stamina

Having stamina or customer limits is usually one way the developers of free to play apps get you to spend money on in-app purchases. Since there are no limits, this eliminates waiting for hours or buying more stamina, customers, etc to play again. You can play to your heart’s content… or until your battery dies. 

Another reason why people spend money on free to play games is to get more of the game’s rare currencies. Let’s look into that. 

Game Currencies in Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure

This game has 3 different currencies:

  1. Gold
  2. Medals
  3. Gems

As you progress through the game, it gets easier and easier to make gold. Customers come to your food truck and buy what they want from your displayed menu. Hard to make recipes are worth more. It seems like one minute I have 60,000 gold and the next it jumps to 300,000 during fever mode.

Gold is used for many things in the game. As you level up your food truck, you can upgrade it to hold more chefs, as long as you got the gold. Gold also allows you to buy chefs, buy ingredients sold in the store, build buildings, strengthen your heroes and purchase slots to increase the number of parties working in the dungeons.

The dungeon screen of the food truck simulation game
The Dungeon screen of Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure. This is where you create parties, upgrade heroes and backpacks, collect ingredients and find random treasure chests.

Yes, you can spend real money to get gold and/or activate fever mode but why would you? As I said in the first paragraph of this section, gold is easy to earn. Some recipes are worth over 15,000 gold. That is more expensive than a Gordon Ramsay steak and yes I checked. 

You can randomly find small chests in the dungeon with gold in them. Also, if you build houses, you charge the villagers rent. Bulk orders also give you gold when completed, especially if they are the harder recipes. 

Bulk orders are orders for one specific dish. If the dish is too difficult to make, due to lack of ingredients, you can change the order by watching an ad or reject it and wait for a new one. They appear every 30 minutes.

You can also activate the fever mode by watching an ad. Presents will come down from the sky via ballons and 75% percent of the time, it is for the fever mode activation. 

Gems

Gems are the uncommon currency, but don’t let that worry you. There are plenty of ways to earn gems without spending your hard-earned dough.

Inside the shop menu is a free gem that you can get every ten minutes if you click on it. Usually, an ad pops up that you can IMMEDIATELY click close.

The Gem shop
The Gem Shop

Right next to that is the ad gem and you get 10 gems for watching an ad. This gem resets every 2 hours.

There are large treasure chests that can be found randomly in the dungeons. These chests appear fairly often. Sometimes I would get three in a row. That is 30 gems right there.

Gems can also be earned through the Slime Dungeon, quests, mines and praying at the shrine. You must build the mines, the Slime Dungeon, and the shrine by purchasing land plots and placing the buildings there.

The Slime Dungeon is a pin pall like mini-game. You tap the levers on the bottom to hit the bad red orbs filled with trash away from the pot and let the ingredients orbs fall into the pot to increase your score. The glowing ingredients orbs are worth more.

The Slime Dungeon Mini Game in Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure
The Slime Dungeon mini game

You earn random prizes based on your ranking. You enter the Slime Dungeon via tickets which resets every 8 hours.  

The shrine is like a lucky spin wheel. You click a button and it randomly falls on a prize. You can do this once a day. 

Gems are used for buying outfits during festivals, bounty slots, increase backpack capacity, gem contracts, upgrades for recipes and strength and hp increases for heroes.

Medals

Medals are the rarest of them all. However, there are still a couple of ways to earn them. Completing bulk orders is one good way. Another way is to play the Slime dungeon mini-game. Also, you can earn medals by praying at the shrine and completing quests. 

What you can get with medals is accessory chests, regular contracts, and premium contracts. That’s it. In fact, I’m not even sure if I ever used a medal unless prompted by the main quest. 

Contracts are what you use to hire heroes. The regular contracts will give you 1 to 3-star heroes and the premium contracts will give you 3 to 5-star heroes. 

With the regular contracts, you earn 3 a day just by doing the daily missions. Also, you can earn contracts by doing the Slime Dungeon mini-game. 

Examples of prizes that can be earned during the slime dungeon mini game in Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure
Examples of prizes that can be earned during the slime dungeon mini game in Cooking Quest: Food Wagon Adventure

If you get a D rank or higher from the Slime Dungeon mini-game, you have a chance to earn a premium contract. I believe that they can also be bought using candies at festivals if it is an item for sale at that time. There are four things for sale at each festival and they are random. 

Accessories are the same way. You can earn up to an A rank accessory for a D rank in the Slime Dungeon mini-game. (B and C are more common.) Also, you can purchase accessory chests during festivals too. As mentioned before, the items are random.

Since the items that are purchased by medals can be earned by other means, there shouldn’t be any reason to be in desperate need of medals. However, there is 1 item that might tempt users into spending real money.

Legendary Contract

The legendary contract is by no means purchasable with in-game currencies. This contract gives you an “over 4-star hero”. (I’m assuming that is a 5-star hero.) The only way to earn this in the game is by finding 100 pieces of torn legendary contracts. 

You can find the pieces from prizes earned from the Slime Dungeon mini-game. I can see an impatient collector buying this contract to complete the list of heroes. There isn’t a point to collecting everything to my knowledge and I do not think that there is an ending to this game. 

The Verdict. Is Cooking Quest Food Wagon Adventure truly free to play?

Yes, Cooking Quest Food Wagon Adventure is a free to play game. It also has in-app purchases. However, I am at level 173 and have most dungeons unlocked without spending a penny. I just watch the ads to get the free stuff.

a Pinterest pin for the post

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If you an impatient perfectionist, then you might buy some in-app purchases to collect everything faster but I do not see the need. My verdict is, you can play this game entirely without spending any real money. If you need more to decide if this game is for you, I included a gameplay video at the bottom. 

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Author's avatar

Amber Borden

Amber is an avid gamer. The first game she ever played was Super Mario Bros on the NES. She has seen many genres of videos games due to her 30 years of gaming. However, Amber typically sticks to RPGs, Sandbox and Simulation.
Since she loves gaming, her first job was at a Gamestop. Also, she has written guides for Gamefaqs. Amber was a full time worker in the retail world, but now she is working on this site from home. No matter what, however, she still plays her video games.