When comparing Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition vs Overcooked 2, the Slant community recommends Overcooked 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best couch/local co-op games for PS4?” Overcooked 2 is ranked 28th while Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition is ranked 39th. The most important reason people chose Overcooked 2 is:
Whether you played the first Overcooked or not, Overcooked 2 is easy to figure out right from the get-go. The recipes for each dish are familiar even if you're not much of a chef, so you can remember which raw ingredients you need as you make your way around the kitchen and work with your co-op partner(s). Once you play a few rounds, you should have a good handle on things, helping you focus on getting everything done as quickly as possible from there on out.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro You get to rebuild and manage a small town
As part of the main story, you find yourself in a storm-wrecked town that needs to be rebuilt. You take it upon yourself to get the farms, livestock, buildings, and economy back up and running again. Even though Harvest Moon is mainly a farming simulator, there's plenty more to do here. You have access to plots of land to farm, mines for quarrying, bodies of water for fishing, and you can prioritize which town buildings to restore, all in order to bring the residents back. Your priorities and choices make all the difference in how everything gets rebuilt.
Pro Tons of freedom to do what you want at your own pace
You can do whatever you feel like without worrying about too many restrictions. With the main story quest, you get to pick and choose your approach to rebuilding the town. This means that you can focus on fishing and mining over farming if you prefer, aside from instances where someone in the story requests a certain item that you can farm up yourself. There are no looming time restrictions or anything like that; you can go at your own speed and do whatever you choose from day to day.
Pro Farming simulator mechanics are simple to pick up and learn
Farming in Harvest Moon is easy to learn. You have a plot of land with squares of fertile soil, and then you just need seeds for whatever you'd like to plant. Caring for your your crops is only a matter of keeping up the habit of watering them, as well as making sure you pluck out any weeds that crop up from time to time. As long as you have the seeds you want and you remember to take care of your farm, you'll be successful in no time.
Pro Two-player co-op speeds up resource gathering for both players
Playing with a friend makes things go by much quicker. You and one other person can co-op to collect resources together, basically cutting your required time for quests by half. Aside from simply enjoying the game with someone else, if you have a goal you want to accomplish and you feel like it's taking a long time, co-op can help speed things along.
Pro Simple to pick up and learn
Whether you played the first Overcooked or not, Overcooked 2 is easy to figure out right from the get-go. The recipes for each dish are familiar even if you're not much of a chef, so you can remember which raw ingredients you need as you make your way around the kitchen and work with your co-op partner(s). Once you play a few rounds, you should have a good handle on things, helping you focus on getting everything done as quickly as possible from there on out.
Pro Hilariously fun couch and online co-op for up to four players
Playing Overcooked 2 with friends is the best. There's so much going on at once in the kitchen, with barriers moving in your way, hazards popping up like cars in the middle of the road separating the two halves of your area, and ingredients, dishes, and half-prepared dishes to move from one place to another. Working together and communicating with your friends through couch co-op or online play is a constant stream of laughter and excited shouting as you mess up, learn, and hopefully get things done. If you don't have anyone to play with, then you can hop online for matchmaking instead.
Pro Fast and frantic cooking action
Overcooked 2 is really fast-paced and keeps you on your toes. You play as a chef in a crazy kitchen with a ton of things going on all at once, with you mixing, preparing, and cooking in between the chaos of moving platforms and environmental obstacles. There's a time limit constantly ticking down at the bottom of the screen; finishing your tasks on time or ahead of schedule earns you a better score in the end. Tossing ingredients to your teammates across the kitchen, or across the moving platforms or obstacles like bodies of water, is a fresh new addition in this game that wasn't in the first Overcooked, making things even faster this time around. It's such a manic yet well-done mix of many different genres and ideas that all come together in the best ways.
Cons
Con Farming is almost pointless outside of story events
Even though Harvest Moon is a farming simulator at its core, the trade is surprisingly not that useful in this game. During your main quest to restore the town and earn money, you have the option of farming, fishing, and mining; by and large, farming is the least efficient of the three, taking more time and earning you less money in the long-run. It's much more productive to either go fishing or mining if you want to rake in more cash at a faster rate, as farming just isn't worth it for the long-haul.
Con Bugs and game crashes
There are some instances where you may run into bugs or the game will outright crash. Sometimes, quests don't progress they way they should, leading you down the wrong paths or refusing to accept items that you're actually supposed to hand in. Game crashes are also unpredictable, varying in how often they happen. So until a few more patches get released, you may want to be more careful about saving often, just in case you have to redo a quest or you lose out on progress from a sudden crash.
Con Bland visuals
The graphics and presentation are nothing to write home about. They look awkward, with the 3D character sprites moving around in a 2D environment, with odd details that don't look quite right. The sprites themselves are pretty low-effort as well, and they don't at all look like they're advanced enough for a home console. Everything just looks low-effort all around and not that great to look at.
Con Not enough new characters
Most of the townspeople here are recycled from previous games in the series. It's a bit lazy to have so many of the same NPCs around without introducing many new ones. Fans of the Harvest Moon games might be happy to see their old favorites again, though they may also get bored by the lack of new faces around. New players won't notice anything wrong, though.
Con Can be incredibly frustrating
Trying to work at such a fast pace with so many obstacles and general mayhem going on at once can wear on you after a while. There's a lot to keep track of at once, and it's easy for things to spiral out of control as your mistakes pile up. If your group isn't doing well and you're running out of time, you might find yourself losing your patience with your team and yelling at them. This might not be the game for you if you don't have a team that's willing to be patient and cooperative with each other, even when you're not doing so well during a particular round.
Con Single-player isn't as fun as co-op
If you only want to play alone, then Overcooked 2 might not be the best game to pick. All the fast-paced fun from co-op mostly comes from communicating with your team and trying to pull off your task together before the time runs out. You control two characters at once while playing alone, but this still lacks the team-based chaos that makes the game so addicting. You could instead go online for matchmaking, though you might get paired with people who don't want to talk or work as an actual team.
Con The controls are a bit sluggish
There's something about the controls that feels heavy and deliberate, and not necessarily in a good way. The feeling goes against the fast-paced nature of the gameplay that demands you in one place and then the next. If you played the first Overcooked, you may notice the difference right away. This change shouldn't be too much of a hassle, though it's still noticeable.