Cooking Mama 4: Kitchen Magic

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Wireless, Download Play Supported)

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Review:

Cooking Mama 4, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2011, is the first Nintendo 3DS installment in this series of Arcade-style games that have players playing through various minigames that roughly approximate the steps required to prepare various food dishes. This game features 60 different unlockable recipes comprised of 200 different minigames, with additional unlockable minigames for doing household chores, and more minigames for combining your recipes with other dishes like pancakes or pizza.

These latter minigames don’t seem to be well thought-out and don’t seem to fit this game’s themes very well. There’s little about dropping fried persimmons on pizza that resembles actual food preparation, and moving a vacuum back and forth up an auto-scrolling course would be pretty tedious and boring even if the controls weren’t terrible.

When you remove all the superfluous elements, what you’re left here with is… a decent enough mini-game collection, with some good minigames and some real stinkers, most making use of the touchscreen while some use the gyroscopic motion sensor or microphone. These games use fairly universal indicators to give players an idea what to do, but sometimes these instructions are unclear and can lead to failing out of a step in the recipe. However, probably the biggest flaw of this part of the game is that it’s just not very different from the same gameplay we’ve already seen multiple times before on Nintendo DS.

I suppose the one other element here that’s different, the stereoscopic 3D and cel-shaded 3D visuals, at least have potential to be interesting. But these visuals aren’t very good, with the cel shading being particularly overbearing, and the actual food in the game just not looking at all delicious. Add to this a grating cartoonish soundtrack and the usual highly-accented voiced exclamations of “Mama”, and you have a presentation that largely fails to make good use of the Nintendo 3DS to propel this series forwards.

Make no mistake, Cooking Mama 4 is a decent enough Arcade-style game, but pretty much all of its new elements fail, and all of its old elements are… well, old. For players who absolutely wanted a Cooking Mama game on Nintendo 3DS, this is that… but not much more than that.

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tl;dr – Cooking Mama 4 is the first Nintendo 3DS entry in this Arcade-style minigame collection series themed after preparing various foods. However, it does little to take advantage of the new hardware, with virtually all of the new elements either poorly-conceived or poorly-implemented. What remains is still good… but it’s also not very different from the same game we’ve already seen three times by this point. Not bad, but there’s absolutely nothing about it that’s essential.

Grade: C

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