Cooking Mama: Sweet Shop

Genre: Arcade

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

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Review:

Cooking Mama: Sweet Shop, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2017, is the third 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 new unlockable recipes comprised of numerous minigames, with a framing device that has you adding these items to an in-game shop.

Unfortunately, despite the potential this premise holds for this game to work in some nice shop Management Simulation elements, it ultimately amounts to very little – unless you want to kill time by tapping on “customers” to accept their cash in exchange for your goods, there’s very little to the shop portion of the game beyond ineffectual cosmetic changes.

Thankfully, this game at least gets the minigame part of things right, and while it’s scaled back from the increasingly scatterbrained approach of the numbered Cooking Mama games, I think centering this game on a strong theme works much to its benefit. You’re buying this game about cooking sweets, and you’re spending the majority of the game… cooking sweets. What a concept, right? Of course, this comes with the usual touchscreen-focused minigames (with some minor use of the Nintendo 3DS microphone in a few), and there’s not anything here out of the ordinary for the series, but overall it works.

What’s more, this game ditches the ugly cel shading of the earlier games, and while it keeps the cartoony mix of 2D and 3D visuals for the menus and “Mama”, the 3D visuals for the actual food itself actually looks really good here. Of course, these are joined by yet another grating cartoonish soundtrack and the usual highly-accented voiced exclamations of “Mama”, but at the very least, the game’s central focus, the food itself, gets the proper attention this time.

By this point, Cooking Mama fans should already know the drill. Cooking Mama: Sweet Shop doesn’t revolutionize the series’ gameplay, and much of what you’ll be doing is the same as prior installments. However, a combination of strong theming, good visuals for the food itself, and a simple focus on the core Arcade-style gameplay make for the strongest entry in the franchise on Nintendo 3DS. It’s a shame that this game absolutely fails to take advantage of its Management Simulation elements, but what’s here works… at least as well as any game in the series does.

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tl;dr – Cooking Mama: Sweet Shop is the third mainline Nintendo 3DS entry in this Arcade-style minigame collection series themed after preparing various foods. This game doesn’t do anything to revolutionize the series formula, and it fails to capitalize on the hints of Management Simulation present here

Grade: C+

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