Starcraft II Hands-On: Aiur Chef

Blizzard is obviously having some fun with the upcoming array of mods for Starcraft II. Aiur Chef, one of four playable mods at BlizzCon 2010, is a mod for up to eight players that challenges you to out-cook the competition. We spent some quality time cooking with the upcoming mod (and not playing well with others) in a demo on the show floor.

The mod casts you as an aspiring Protoss cook competing for the prestigious title of Aiur Chef. The competition revolves around cooking dishes using a secret themed ingredient. The action is broken up into three timed rounds that send you scouring the map for ingredients to cook one of three recipes that earn you points. In our demo, the secret ingredients were bananas in the first round, rainbows for the second, and High Templars for the third.

To create recipes, you'll have to explore the map to collect ingredients. That objective will be complicated by your opponents, who'll be doing the exact same thing. While you'll have a basic array of attacks, your competitive edge will come from completing recipes. In addition to giving you points that go toward your overall score, finishing recipes can yield special powers or items that come in handy when dealing with enemies. As a result, you'll have to do a bit of strategizing on what recipe it makes the most sense to go after first, due to your limited inventory space.

From what we played, Aiur Chef is a fun mod that will definitely be worth checking out when it becomes available, free of charge, later this year via Battle.net.