The quirky Japanese cooking game that is Cooking Mama is a intriguing
case, for one things its colourful and delightfully Japanese, however,
its far too easy and lacks any real incentive to play, though that will
never stop you from having fun for as long as it lasts you.
There are 3 main modes in Cooking Mama; “lets cook” which lets you (as
the titles suggests) cook one of the 76 recipes, “lets combine” lets
you combine two recipes together to string two sets of mini games and
“use skill” provides you a handful of challenges based on the mini
games in “lets cook“. Right off the bat there aren’t that many modes
and it probably could of done with more and it is the lack of things to
do in Cooking Mama that makes it only suitable in short bursts.
In the 76 recipes you will be cooking that includes pizza, sandwiches,
rice balls, sushi and even a cup of ramen, Mama (as she is so
adequately named) will guide you through the cooking process step by
step, you will be cutting, kneading, frying, basically everything you
would expect to do in real life. The actual input put in to these tasks
via the touch screen is fairly well done to say the least, some are
dead easy and some are a little convoluted and tricky, more so than
they should be, but the instructions for each task are always there if
you can be bothered to read them. Throughout a recipe you will be doing
roughly 4 to 7 tasks, and since some of them only take about 5 seconds
to do, and 1 recipe wont last you long, some tasks however let you
arrange things on a plate and stuff that lets you add more finesse to
your meal with no time limit, depending on how long you take could
extend the lifetime. Depending on how well you have done you will be
scored out of a 100 and given a bronze, silver or gold medal and that’s
where the challenge in Cooking Mama practically starts and ends,
cooking is easy, but perfecting the tasks isn’t, so getting gold medals
every time wont be happening. If its challenge you want then Cooking
Mama can provide it in the “use skill” mode, here you can perform the
majority of the tasks seen in the main game, only this time they will
be a lot harder an ridiculously timed, however this mode doesn’t offer
any reward to the player and is just there for a few more moments to
kill time aimlessly.
Graphically, Cooking Mama is hard to describe, it seems to have gone
for a more realistic look in terms of the food, and in the process,
looks a little rough, you can see some very striking pixel problems
around the edges of some images and that’s what sadly most of it is,
images. The menus and mama her self look very colourful and quirky
indeed, that’s not enough for it to really make up for the peculiar
looking food although it does help a lot. Games and good soundtracks
are becoming more of a staple than luck theses days and Cooking Mama
sadly does not deliver that staple, the main game music is just
monotonous and boring, its drones on throughout the game and really
begins to make you feel like dropping the DS on the floor hoping it
would just go away and leave you alone, that said the sound effects in
Cooking Mama are actually pretty good, things fry, things boil, and
things just get cooked in a convincing and generally good way.
Overall Cooking Mama just doesn’t have enough going for it, it often
pleases with its visual style and certain mini games that do require
some skill (its shame its only some) but above all that the one problem
still remains, there’s no real purpose, no real sense of achievement,
no reward, its simply just a time killer that can be enjoyed in short
bursts. If your looking for a DS game that will provide you with hours
of play and will be most likely in your DS away from the dust than
actually collecting the dust, this game isn’t for you, however, if your
just looking for something fun and quirky for a few hours then its
worth giving Cooking Mama a shot.
~Death Burnout
