
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. A nice bang for the twenty bucks.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.

For a simple set of touch screen challenges, the designers give the production a good amount of legs. And as you add more recipes to the queue, you're also building up the skill set of mini-challenges that can be practiced and played outside of the cooking "game." Here, you can try and top the high score or go for the maximum, and if you pull off the top score possible it'll be noted with a nice, satisfying chef hat.

So there's a discovery element to Cooking Mama: what sorts of dishes are hidden to unlock? It also has a bit of challenge due to a "margin of error" element - as good as you are at following directions, there's that one portion that can screw up that important gold medal. All progress is saved, and the more dishes you complete the more that become available.
NINTENDO DS GAMES COOKING MAMA PORTABLE
More importantly, though, it's been well-designed as a portable game, as the developers have given it a good "pick up and play" presentation: turn on the system, make a dish, get your rank, turn it off. The big question: is any of this fun? Though the entirety of this game is simply doing what you're told as quickly as possible, it's actually an amusing game if you're not expecting much out of it. The complex tasks are the ones you have to watch out for: cutting tough meats, weighing specific ingredients, saut¿ing diced vegetables, or performing specific tasks in "rhythm." Even though most of the game is a simple matter of paying attention and following the instructions, the tougher techniques can turn a gold metal meal into a bronze medal yuckfest. Most are retardedly simple: slicing an onion on the lines, or quickly chopping chives, or shredding some garlic.

Each step in the recipe has been paired down into a touch-screen mini-game. It can be as simple as making instant ramen to something more involved like pork curry and rice. The game is nothing more than a set of casually laid-out challenges where each "level" is a certain meal. It might have the side effect of giving you the idea of how particular meals are prepared, but it's doubtful that you can apply any skills learned in Cooking Mama to real world cooking.
NINTENDO DS GAMES COOKING MAMA HOW TO
Cooking Mama isn't a cooking simulator, so don't expect it to teach you how to make some yummy dishes.
