If you can't take the heat.....then get up out the kitchen.
The concept is quite simple. Cooking Mama is composed of timed mini games for each dish. First you pick a dish off of the menu. After the dish is picked that is when the mini games begin. Some mini games include chopping vegetables (quickly tapping the knife with the stylus), peeling carrots and potatoes (quickly moving the stylus up and down over the vegetables) and pan frying ingredients (adding ingredients into a pan and moving the stylus back and forth so that the ingredients don’t burn). The ultimate goal is to complete each dish with a gold metal.
The game play has several annoying flaws. For starters, some steps are hard to complete because the game, at times, doesn’t respond to your actions. So peeling potatoes and carrots can be difficult to pull of in the allotted time period. Another problem is that the directions aren’t always clear, especially in the beginning of the game where you have no clue what to do. Not to mention the fact that if you mess up once on any steps for a dish, you will not receive a gold metal. One tiny mistake can cause you not to progress. Even though the game play is repetitive at the same time it is very addicting. The graphics aren’t phenomenal, but they aren’t terrible either. The colors are very bright and vibrant. Cooking Mama has an anime/manga look to her. Of course the food doesn’t look realistic. It has more of a cartoon look to it which suits it fine.
There isn’t much sound to the game. In fact, Cooking Mama doesn’t talk at all. The same music is played throughout the entire game. This becomes both boring and annoying quickly.
The replay value isn’t very high considering there are 76 dishes in the game. Once you get the hang of things and your skill heightens then you shouldn’t have a problem unlocking everything. Besides the main mode, “Let’s Cook”, there are two other modes. There is “Combination Mode”, where you can combine different foods together. This is where your creativity comes in. The other mode is “Use Skill”, where you have to complete skills on different levels against the clock. It would have been nice if there was some type of multiplayer mode in the game. This game could become even more addicting if it supported WiFi.
Cooking Mama brings to the table innovative and addicting game play, along with a really cool concept all for a budget price of $19.99. Even with all of these good things there still seems like there is something missing. This along with the repetitive mini games makes Cooking Mama one of those games you play in small dosages.