Cute collection of cooking mini games with lots of extras.

Story

Mama is a master cook and surely knows her way around the kitchen. Now she is inviting you, a budding chef, into the kitchen to train you to become a true master chef for family and friends. She’ll be guiding you as you learn the fine arts of cooking and preparing various meals. Next time you want to treat your friends, you’ll know exactly what to do!

Introduction

Cooking Mama 2 is the sequel to the first Cooking Mama game for the Nintendo DS, and also to the Wii title Cooking Mama: Cook Off. It builds upon the same formula as the previous games in the series; a casual and cute cooking simulator. This time around Mama has a wide variety of foods to make, and has also invited friends and family into her kitchen to try the food you make for them. The themes of cooking and food is easily relatable for most people and together with the approachable pick-up-and-play controls this game works great as an introduction into the world of video games for newcomers and especially those who enjoy cooking and food.

The Game

Cooking Mama 2 is a unique game that’s hard to describe. The whole game is basically based around a wide variety of mini games which represent the different steps needed when preparing a meal – break eggs, heat the oven, peal fruits, cut meat, add ingredients to the soup and mix stuff in the mixer to name a few. When making a meal, you have to complete a whole series of mini games, which are based on the ingredients and steps needed when preparing that meal. There are countless different mini games featured here, so you’ll be seeing new stuff for quite a while.

Controls

Cooking Mama 2 is completely controlled with the stylus. You’ll be chopping vegetables, grinding meat and kneading dough etc with the stylus and most of the time it feels very intuitive. Every mini game has its own unique controls so there’s a lot of variation in how exactly the game is played, which is a big part of its design and appeal.
Most of the time the instructions you get are brief and sometimes even cryptic which can be confusing – this can often lead to a trial and error approach in order to learn how exactly each mini game is supposed to work. Typically though, it’s very easy and self-explanatory.
Besides the stylus you’ll also be blowing on the DS microphone to cool off various foods, and this works surprisingly well.
Occasionally the controls fail, as the on-screen instruction is indicating one thing, and the stylus simply doesn’t register it. This typically happens in the knife cutting games where you are supposed to slice up and down along a line – the game seems to be very picky about how it registers the cutting.

Content

The game has three main game modes. The Cook With Mama mode is simply where you cook a meal of your choice with the supervision of Mama. She’ll tell you how things are to be done step-by-step and your goal is to complete each step in the food making process without messing up. Depending on how you fare you’ll be awarded a medal (gold, silver, bronze or none) and a score rating. In this game mode you’ll also be able to practice every step as many times you like.

The game starts with 12 recipes available to you. Some examples of these are chili dogs, waffles, squid fried rice and apple pie. The game features an additional 68 recipes that can be unlocked when you fulfill certain secret criteria. A new recipe is typically unlocked by successfully making a meal out of the available recipes, or scoring a certain medal award.

There’s also the Let’s cook! mode where you will be preparing a meal for a friend in a so-called live situation – that is to say that Mama won’t be helping you if you mess up and the food you make is about to be eaten and rated. If you fail some critical step here, the food will become inedible and thus means that you have failed. Upon completing a meal, you will typically be allowed to arrange the food on the plate freely as you see fit, as if you were serving it. You can also save a picture of the finished meal and your score rating results together with a date stamp. This data can then be stored in the diary and can later be shown to friends. The diary also has different stamps that you can use to decorate these pictures with in order to make them more personal.

As a bonus when you’re making food, you are sometimes rewarded with presents and these can contain new stamps to use in your diary, but also new designs to customize the colors and style your kitchen and the utensils. This feature has gotten quite some room in the game, and is basically just for looks – most of the stuff you can customize are minor things in the background that are barely noticed when playing the game. You can also win new clothes and accessories for Mama to wear.

With all the unlockable recipes and extra content, this game offers a lot of game hours if you want to master all the recipes with a gold rating and unlock everything. But either way it probably won’t keep you hooked for hours per session – especially if you play alone.
Watching someone play Cooking Mama 2 can be just as amusing as playing it yourself, so taking turns with someone can be a fun, cute social activity that is sure to evoke many laughs. It’s fun to watch someone mess up in this game – you’ll see spilt milk, burnt food and worse.
You can also choose to send a single-player demo to a friend through the Wi-Fi connection if you want to let someone try the game.

Multiplayer

The multiplayer mode is called Cooking Contest, and it can be played with four players using a single copy of the game. The host of the game will select what activity will be performed. For example you could choose to shape hamburger meat, pour dough into cake tins or slice pasta. The goal of the competitors is to repeat the selected activity for as many times as possible during a set time – about 20 seconds or so.
The Cooking contest can be played solo too, and it will then keep track on your records for each activity. Altogether there are 16 different activities in the Cooking Contest, and it works great as a party game for about 30 minutes or so.

Graphics

The graphics are very bright, clear and cheery. It reminds of a children’s cartoon and has a very unique pastel style to it. It is somehow pleasurable to watch the various vegetables and fruits being peeled, chopped and cut while the meat can look quite gross – especially the octopuses and shrimps. It’s all very detailed and well done – and the animation is also remarkably done with great love and care. This is a game that will make you feel hungry, seeing all the good looking food right in front of you all the time.
Cooking Mama 2 reuses assets from the previous game, but since the graphics style is so unique, I think it’s perfectly warranted.

Sound

The sound and music are perfect for the game – the sound effects are quite realistic as you’ll hear the sizzling frying pan, the knife cut against the cutting board and the crisp sound that vegetables make when they are peeled etc.
The music is very piano-heavy, resembling easy-going 1920’s piano roll music. This certainly is quite amusing as it puts a comical spin on the whole game and its setting and atmosphere.

Summary

Cooking Mama 2 is a casual game in every sense of the word. You won’t want to play for longer than about 15 minutes at a time, because once you’ve seen the basic mini games it’s mostly about repeating the same things over and over again. The game has some true potential in introducing new audiences into gaming and it is very amusing and exciting the first few hours. Despite its simplicity it’s a very novel concept, and the Cooking Contest will give you and your friends many laughs.

Developed By: Cooking Mama Ltd
Published By: 505 Games
Version Reviewed: Nintendo DS
Genre: Cooking Simulator
Players: 1-4 (Single Card)
Released: 2007-11-13