Cooking Mama: Cook Off

Aug. 17, 2008

I've heard a lot of random buzz about this game, so I was curious as to how it actually played. Plus, Sunday is my cooking day; always got time on Sunday to cook some nice meals.

Category

Cooking Simulator

Pros

• You can actually learn a thing or two about cooking from this game. That's pretty neat.
• Customizable steps - such as putting the ketchup/mayonnaise on your hot dog, or what to put on your hamburger - is a really neat function of the game, where you can be creative with no penalties.
• The cook off mode looks like it could be fun with friends, but perhaps not for long.
• Mama's accent is just so bizarre you can't help but laugh at it.

Cons

• For all that you can learn, some of the steps in cooking a meal are just mini-games with no real educational value. For example, for the hot dog all you do is move your hand back and forth to catch ingredients as they fall. Because we all like a challenge when putting relish in our hotdog!
• Anything that involves a gentle touch is really hard to do in this game. Breaking eggs into a bowl became my nemesis.
• Real cooking involves a lot of repetitive things - fry this, cut that, etc. Cooking Mama simulates cooking, so a lot of the gameplay is repetitive. It's not a fault of CM so much as it is a judgment on cooking. However, the key difference is that a game doesn't give you quite as much freedom when you cook, so it's even more repetitive.

Verdict

I didn't play this game to the full hour. It's just so repetitive. It's certainly amusing, but it does not hold my attention for long.