#COOKING GAMES COOKING MAMA MAC#

If you burn an ingredient or waste it in the final stages of cooking, you can still get a lower score, but it’s much easier to nab the coveted three-star award without the need for total perfection. Mama is also fairly forgiving in this iteration, with simple mistakes not penalising you too much during gameplay. While some slices of gameplay are stressful – the pasta-cutting mini-game in particular requires good finesse – most are a satisfying breeze. Each mini-game requires a hefty dose of concentration, with a generous timer counting down seconds as you cook. Drag and drop rice lots onto a plate to please Mama. Circle potato growths to cut them out with a spoon.

Rub the screen to coat your steak like a schnitzel.

#COOKING GAMES COOKING MAMA MAC#

Here, this gameplay is once again adapted to screens (the game is available on iOS devices, Mac computers and Apple TV) with simple flicks, rubs, presses, pushes and pulls necessary to correctly complete each recipe mini-game.

Touch controls are perfectly suited to Cooking Mama, with the first few games in the franchise having showcased the Nintendo DS touch controls well. It’s nearly enough to make you forget about the game’s limited recipe range. That said, the mini-game loop in Cuisine! is still very engaging, and filled with a mix of classic and new Cooking Mama activities that allow you to exercise your reaction time, creativity, memorisation, and other skills. Seeing the same meals pop up again and again can be a downer, particularly when you really just want to complete your recipe book. Occasionally, completing a recipe twice will unlock a new variant – steak with corn, or doughnuts with chocolate sauce for example – but other times, you’re just repeating recipes to gain points that can unlock in-game cosmetics, like new hats or clothes for Mama. It’s fun to discover new recipes, and there’s always good, frantic mini-games to complete, but the game can quickly become repetitive, and it’s very common to start a recipe and realise halfway that you’ve already completed it before. While this is by design, the chance-based nature of ingredient appearances does result in an uneven experience for Cooking Mama: Cuisine!. This streak was eventually broken by the appearance of chicken on the fifth day, which unlocked a number of new possibilities. Playing the game over the course of a week, I had two days that repeated every ingredient, meaning I couldn’t unlock anything new until the following day. Read: How Wylde Flowers incorporates escape and empowerment There are four ‘chicken’ recipes to find, four ‘beef’ recipes, four ‘dessert’ recipes and so on – and while this may increase as the game expands, jumping in too frequently will likely result in disappointment, thanks to the increased repetition of daily ingredients and overall lack of variety in meals. But the more casual nature of the game does hamper it in a few regards.Ĭurrently, the recipe book in the game is fairly slim, with only four major recipes available for most base ingredients. There’s real joy to be had in popping in and discovering what ingredients are around, and whether you can use them to fill the missing spots in your recipe book. Successfully creating a dish will unlock new daily ingredients which can be incorporated into future meals.Ĭooking Mama: Cuisine! is designed as a moreish mobile title – one that you can easily jump into every day in quick bursts. With a handful of other ingredients available alongside this base, you’re encouraged to experiment and try new combinations until you find one that works. Some days, you get beef as a base ingredient. It’s a simple flip of the standard formula – but one that works excellently to keep you hooked, and trying new things. You don’t know what recipe you’re creating as you play, and the entire end result is a mystery, revealed only when Mama pulls back the curtains at the end of your cooking cycle. The core twist is that in Cuisine!, you get presented with a variety different ingredients, which rotate on a daily basis, and need to combine them to form meals. Cooking Mama: Cuisine!, the latest game in the series, is a fresh title for Apple Arcade that actually strays away from this formula, and brings its own unique pros and cons. The Cooking Mama franchise has enchanted plenty of aspiring chefs since the early days of the Nintendo DS – but while each iteration has slowly expanded the minigame-focussed gameplay of the series, they’ve all largely stuck to the same basic formula: you play as a young cook working your way through a recipe book.

Cooking games cooking mama