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Cooking Mama Review
Written by Cody Musser on Friday, September 29, 2006
User Score
Makes you hungry. For delicious, delicious miso soup.
Too repetitive.
I was going into Cooking Mama with high hopes, and unfortunately, like most similar situations, it never quite reached my expectations. Don't get me wrong, Cooking Mama is fun, but my initial impression was that I'd be picking up a collection that deserved much more than the games $20 price-tag. I was mistaken.
There just isn't enough to go around in Cooking Mama, and while the game does contain a slew of recipes for the making, the mini-games used to create them are repeated far too often. The mini-games used vary from tapping the stylus on a knife to chop ingredients, to pan-frying meats while adjusting the temperature of the oven. The problem lies in the fact that after mastering a mini-game, the difficulty is for the most part entirely removed, and the subsequent appearances of that particular game just come off as tedious. Add to the fact that some particular mini-games show up in a large majority of the game 75 recipes, and you have a new recipe ... one for boredom.
While the recipes themselves are one of the high points of Cooking Mama, many could find little difference in creating crab fried rice, chicken fried rice, or one of the other fried rice combinations that make an appearance. The Japanese recipes are surprising in many instances, like the shrimp biscuits we mentioned in our preview, but there is also a lot of repetition present amongst them. Expect to make rice in every single possible way it can be crafted into something edible in Cooking Mama.
It should also be noted that Cooking Mama is definitely not a cooking simulation game. Creating the recipes in the game won't instill within the player anymore than a vague sense of what actually goes into creating these foods. It was probably never intended to be so, but was Cooking Mama to delve slightly deeper into the realistic side of preparing some of these dishes, the depth of the game could have increased exponentially. While Cooking Navi handled that aspect well in Japan, America has yet to see a DS game cover such topics.
While hindered, Cooking Mama does succeed in various areas. The game preaches the DS motto, 'pick up and play', better than most other releases. Within seconds players can be crafting a dish; they can have it completed within minutes, and then be on their way without looking back. Cooking Mama exudes the utmost portability.
Cooking Mama also succeeds in appealing to the specific crowd that Majesco is targeting with this release. Fans of Brain Age, and other casual games, will find that this release delivers touchscreen-centric gameplay as well as any other game. That is, as long as they're not looking for a game that is too deep.
I will say that Cooking Mama surprisingly made me hungry for some of the pixilated foods I created. I couldn't help but think of what Miso Soup would taste like as I finished the mini-games to create it, but can we consider Cooking Mama a success because it makes you want to turn it off to eat tasty foods? I wonder.
Another aspect of Cooking Mama that will unfortunately make many players wish to turn the game off is the music. I appreciate game music, and while I don't often laud handheld games for their music, I do play with headphones on and at least try to notice the quality. In playing Cooking Mama, expect to hear one song, over and over again. The cheery 'bloop-de-bleep' repeated throughout the entire game is enough to make ears bleed.
I may come off sounding harsh, but I should reiterate that I went into Cooking Mama with the very high hopes that this could be a WarioWare clone with some truly unique substance. In the end, the game came up dry for me, but it doesn't particularly fail in any aspect, excluding of course the music. As long as fans don't expect much more than the $20 budget price-tag, Cooking Mama is a wonderful mini-game showcase that is ultimately one of the few cooking themed games America has ever seen. Gamers, particularly casual gamers, shouldn't hesitate to give Cooking Mama a try, if only for the low cost.
posted October 1, 2006