Alfredo
Alfredo is a chef. Alfredos are always chefs. That’s just how it works, certainly in cartoons and movies and online casino games. Pop culture in other words. Alfredo in this instance is an instant win game that’s set in a kitchen. Not just any old kitchen either but one of a great chef. You know because there are five stars in the logo of this game, which also doubles as the sign for Alfredo’s kitchen. It doesn’t mention Michelin stars but the inference is clear: this is a kitchen of some renown. The logo also features a red chilli. Alfredo likes to spice things up it would appear.
As for the game itself, it involves clicking on ovens in turn to select and deselect them. You can play with as many as three ovens and as few as one. Each time you deselect one, its light will be extinguished. The setting for the game is a commercial kitchen and in addition to the three ovens whose flues disappear into the ceiling, there’s a refrigerator, some pots and pans hanging up and some spotlights. It’s just a regular kitchen in other words, albeit a very clean one.
What’s Cooking?
By the looks of it, Alfredo is a little too fond of his own cooking. He’s a big ruddy lump of a man, an obese chef clad in whites and a pair of red crocs, a man who is the epitome of uncool. This only attests to Alfredo’s culinary skills however: he’s too busy cooking up a storm to worry about looking good. The graphics for this game are extremely shoddy, the text areas especially. Typefaces are hard to make out due to unnecessary shadow effects, and the whole game looks like it was assembled hastily or the work of an untalented developer.
Alfredo is at least mobile-compatible, so you should be able to get it to work on your iPhone or Android at least. Whether you’d want to is a different matter. The game also works smoothly on desktop, and runs in HTML5 by default but also comes with a Flash option. Alfredo is a game that lets you set a bet of between 0.25 and 10 coins per game. This is actually per oven, so if you choose to play with all three ovens activated, you’ll actually be setting a max bet of 30 coins.
Three in the Oven
The buttons that appear at the bottom of the screen look particularly cheap in this game. The shimmer effect, the typography and the colours are all uninspiring. A Play Max button allows you to save some time by cranking up your bet as well as the number of active ovens. If you look closely you’ll also spot an autoplay option tucked away in the bottom right of the screen.
There’s the option of manually clicking this all the way up, presumably to 1,000 games, but since it advances in increments of one, it takes too long to test this theory. When you’ve set your bet and are ready to play, hit the blue PLAY button. That’s when the zaniness of this game really cheaps in. What do you think will happen next? Do you think the ovens could open in turn to reveal a prize cooking inside? Well, that doesn’t happen…
Food, Glorious Food
What happens instead is that with three swift bell rings in succession, a trio of food items spring up upon the hobs of each oven. So oven one might show a lamb shank, a bowl of soup and a slice of pizza for instance. Oven two might show a lamb shank, a roast chicken and a pie. And then oven three might pop up to show another lamb shank and two loaves of bread in a row. At the same time, the value of the possible prize is displayed at the top of each oven. This can vary between 20 and 10,000 coins on average when you’re playing with the max bet enabled. It’s possible though to win as much as 100,000, or 5,000 on the other hand with one of the lowest bets set.
Alfredo in Summary
Alfredo is such an odd little game. It’s so tacky and unrefined, and yet faintly amusing at the same time. There’s a certain novelty value in clicking each oven to select or deselect it and then hitting the play button and waiting to see what foods it produces. There’s nothing remotely mouth-watering about the depiction of the food here, so Alfredo is unlikely to leave your stomach rumbling. For a man who possesses five stars, Alfredo’s cuisine looks very plain indeed. An odd game that you can play for fun or play for real money, Alfredo is worth playing only for curiosity value.
