Cooking Mama (DS)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.9 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Alex Navarro
• Reviewed on: 09/18/2006
• Updated on: 09/19/2006
• Released on: 09/12/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Cooking Mama (DS) Review

For the aspiring Rachael Rays and Bobby Flays of the world comes Cooking Mama, a culinary-themed puzzler for the Nintendo DS that makes liberal use of the touch screen to have you perform just about any kind of cooking-related task you can think of. The game tasks you with all the preparatory work for a variety of recipes through a quick and slightly disjointed series of minigames, all while Mama, a bright-eyed anime chef, judges your progress and eventually assigns you a grade based on how quickly and accurately you performed the tasks at hand. It's a bright, colorful game with a lot of charm and some amusing minigames, but it's also exceedingly light on difficulty or depth, and it does eventually get old.

Everything you do in Cooking Mama revolves around your master kitchen tool, which is the game's term for the DS's stylus. With this master kitchen tool, you can do anything. It slices, it dices, it mixes, it presses, it grates, and it even delivers sauces smoothly and evenly. It's basically the kitchen appliance of Ron Popeil's greatest dreams, and it's a breeze to use. Each time you are presented with a task, you simply tap, swipe, or scribble with the stylus. Say you're presented with some garlic over a grater. Just put the stylus on the garlic, and swipe it back and forth to grate, while periodically clearing out the collected garlic gunk on the bottom side of the grater. Want to pan fry some meat and vegetables? Watch as a specific progression of tasks slides by telling you when to raise and drop the oven temperature, periodically stir with the stylus, and perhaps even flip the food in the pan from time to time. You even get to blow into the microphone in certain games to cool things off. It's all very simple action, relying on quick, easy movements with the stylus and some good timing, but it's all quite fun too, at least at first.

There are at least a few dozen minigames in Cooking Mama, though some of those are variants on the same basic game, and all of them are tied together through a specific progression of games for each recipe. The dishes themselves are made up of a wide variety of foods, ranging from boiled rice to spaghetti Bolognese, pork-fried kebabs, and so on. There are 76 in all, and there's even a mode that lets you combine certain recipes into new dishes. Unfortunately, as neat as that sounds, the basic progression of the game doesn't lend itself to long-term enjoyment.

The main problem with Cooking Mama is that it just doesn't have a very good progression to it. With each dish you play a series of the various minigames, but not in any kind of logical order. Basically, each time you complete one of the games, you're spit back out into the main dish menu, and have to click the icon for the next minigame to start it. With this kind of structuring, you lose the sense that you're actually involved in the cooking process, and instead just feel like you're actually playing a scattered series of minigames with no real overarching point to them. The game simply lacks the frenetic pacing of something like a WarioWare, or the cohesive structuring of a game like Trauma Center, and without either, you're left with a series of similar, simplistic minigames that feel disconnected and eventually lose their novelty after a few hours of play.

Continue reading

Recent user reviews

• Average user rating: 0 stars Not yet available
  Back to product review
• My rating: 0 stars Write review

• Showing 2 of 2 user reviews

• 3.0 stars

  "An educational game about preparing and cooking various foods by following a recipe"

  by voiceofagamer on March 14, 2008

• 4.0 stars

  "very addicting and challenging"

  by MixMasterBean on January 2, 2008

• See all 2 user reviews Write review