Cooking Mama 2: World Kitchen Review

After playing the 2 predecessors to Cooking Mama 2 World Kitchen on the DS and being pleasantly surprised with how fun it is, I was looking forward to trialling the Wii version. Great I thought, with the Wiimote, you can interact more with the game, slicing and dicing your way towards a delicious dish. This should be quite fun.
How wrong I was. Please allow me to elaborate on my reasons behind this bold statement.

You start the game with the option to "customise your character", which would have been nice had you been given the chance to actually customise your character. Sadly, customisation means you can choose boy or girl, one of four samey hair cuts and change the colour of your generic looking dress. Whether or not you can change the outfits later on in the game I am unsure, but in the time I played I did not see that option.

After doing this you are then taken to the menu. You can now choose between practice mode and Cooking With Mama mode. I choose practice mode seeing as I have no idea what I was actually doing. In this practice mode, I was hoping to see some kind of tutorial, but I was wrong. No tutorial mode whatsoever. In fact I have no idea why practice mode even exists because it's no different to the main game. You are still penalised every time you get something wrong in the same way that the main game does. So you may as well go straight for the main game as the practice mode is just repetition.

The idea of the game is you have to use the Wii remote kitchen utensils and aid Mama in cooking something delicious for her friends. So for instance when chopping something, you use the Wiimote like you would a knife and physically chop. When flipping a frying pan, you use the Wiimote as a handle and pull it back towards you to flip the tasty morsel over to save it from burning.
Getting these actions right though is a fine art. Because of lack of instructions (the manual just gives a brief overview) you find yourself constantly baffled by what you're doing, for instance you have to grate some bread to make breadcrumbs, using a side to side action to do so. You find yourself doing so well, then all of a sudden it stops grating even though you're waving like a mad man. What the game doesn't tell you is that you have to sharply move your controller down to bang the bread on the grater ridding it of clogged bread. I only found this out whilst waving my Wiimote around like a total loon whilst screaming "Why won't you work?"

Another huge downside is that unfortunately the game has the unresponsive controls I've ever come across, you could be chopping away then suddenly it just won't work. This is the same for every action which gets very, very frustrating. Or on the other hand, it will not work but then it starts to overcompensate for the fact it missed your last 20 actions and does everything on full strength, which is annoying if you're doing a fiddly task such as cracking open an egg. You find yourself banging on the side of the bowl nicely, but when it stops working, you tap a bit harder, then BANG you've just thrown your egg all over the wall. This then has a knock on effect to whatever action you're attempting which you then just fail at the task. I had to put the game down and come back to it as I was getting more and more angry. At one point I was pretty much stood directly in front of my sensor bar and still nothing happened. I have tested this with all 4 of my Wiimote's and 2 sensor bars (wired and wireless) and it's still the same, which for a game that relies solely on these interactions is in my eyes, unacceptable.

Onto a good point, the move to 3D suits the series and has been nicely executed. Everything is brightly coloured and cutesy styles as you would expect from an obscure Japanese cooking game. Also new is voice acting, I personally found this pretty difficult to understand as there is such a thick Japanese accent to the characters. I ended up turning the sound off anyway because you only hear the same 2 or 3 lines throughout the entire game which really begins to grind.

Another new addition are the ‘Mama will fix it' mini games, when you mess up an action you take control of Mama and try to sort the mess. I found these to be very repetitive and again, not explained so it's all a bit of a guessing game as to what you have to do. Providing you get this mini game right, you are then back on track to creating your dish.
There is also a multiplayer addition to this game but after my friend saw me playing this title she wanted no part of it, so I was unable to test it.
The basic gist of things is you can take part in a cookery contest with up to 8 friends and the person whose meal has been cooked the best wins. Riveting stuff, I'm sure.

In short, Cooking Mama 2 was a huge disappointment to me. The original DS versions had a sort of addictive charm to them, something that the latest Wii version appears to have lost. With its lack of tutorial and useless controls it has made me want nothing more than to walk away from it completely, which is sad as I really enjoyed the others. I am well aware that I have been pretty harsh on this game in this review but to those who question, I invite them to try this game for themselves.