App review: Cooking Mama

Learning to cook on the go is now even simpler with the “Cooking Mama” iPhone/iPod Touch game! It made it’s first appearance on the Nintendo DS, and then the Wii, capturing audiences of all ages.

“Cooking Mama” is a quirky cultinary game where you follow a series of recipes to make a nice meal as the end result. Dishes are prepared by manipulating the utensils with your finger. This includes chopping, flipping, kneeding, slicing, dicing, stirring, peeling, and more. Mama rates you on your performance at each step of the way. The better you do each task, the happier Mama gets. However, if you don’t finish the task within a certain amount of time, she gets mad! The better you prepare the dishes, the more receipes you can unlock.

You start off with 4 recipes dishes — Hamburger stewed in tomato sauce, potato salad, pork and vegetable soup, and gyoza. And as you complete these dishes, new ones are unlocked. There’s a total of 15 recipes altogether.

Cooking Mama has three modes of game play — Full Recipes, Practice, and Cooking contest. Full Recipes will allow you to make a complete meal with various cooking tasks. In Practice mode, you can select the type of task to practice on. And in Cooking Contest, you race against the clock on a specific task only.

I did notice that some of my actions do not register properly, especially ones which require circular motion. For example, when making soup, stirring is required, it doesn’t catch my finger motion, so I end up stirring too late, or not at all.

Another thing I’m not too fond of is the wait-time between each task. It seems to break the flow of the game. Sometimes the curtain closing and reopening takes longer than completing the cooking task itself.

However, these two annoyances are pretty minor compared to the overall game play. Even if you fail making the dish, Mama will help fix it for you. Cooking Mama is a hilariously fun game that proves to be quite enjoyable. To get a taste of Cooking Mama, you can download Cooking Mama Lite for free for your iPhone or iPod Touch. You can make one full recipe in the lite version. Cooking Mama is in the iTunes store for $6.99.