Cooking Mama Let's Cook! review
Okay so I didn't even KNOW there was a cooking mama game released on phones. Apparently it's from may 2015 so clearly I've been under a friggin rock or some shit
either way
it's still going. It's... actually friggin good.
I'll keep this fairly brief and try and summarise it. First off, if you don't know, Cooking Mama is a series of fun, casual, minigame-focused cooking themed games on the Nintendo DS. Office Creates made them, they were pretty fantastic.
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Good points:
1: It's friggin COOKING MAMAAAAAA :D :D :D :D :D
2: It's FREE*
3: Apparently there's a total of like, 86 recipes? which beats out Cooking Mama 3's total of 80 recipes. That's... like... a LOT
4:The graphics are actually really good. It's 3d but they've managed to faithfully recreate the cartoon style of the original games and it looks actually great.
5: you can customise Mama's hair. so uh. I gave her black kitty ear headbands, and lilac, short hair
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- (continued) which combined with the cute cooking mama t-shirt and shorts she's wearing makes her look super friggin adorable. There seems to be less clothing options, sadly, but you can change her hairstyle a lot (lots of colour options, about six style options. they're all p. good tho)
*: (free as in ad supported, with microtransactions :| fairly cheap ones mind you, and any purchase allows you to turn off ads entirely, but still...)
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4: You get like... 3 recipes to start with. You earn coins by completing recipes and you can redo them with a higher difficulty, and I guess maybe that gives you more coins?? plus you can like... get daily gifts or something, and more recipes and stuff unlock as you go along, and there are minigames like... farming ones?? you can do to get MORE coins as well??
then you can use those to unlock other recipes... but yeah. otherwise you gotta pay cash-money :/
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here's the odd other points of note:
Because it's a touch screen interface, on a phone, it's had to make some allowances for there not being a "precise" (loool) input from a DS stylus. As such a lot of the games feel easier?? There's a lot more allowance and it feels surprisingly more responsive and accurate, but it IS however harder to gauge exactly how much force you're imparting when you have to "flick" things off other things or into other things.
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This isn't a bad thing exactly though, god knows sometimes it would frustrate the crap out of me when the game would just refuse to register a tap or a swipe with the stylus for no reason other than "fuk uyo" from the DS, or you'd miss by like, ONE PIXEL or something I dunno. It's pretty fun in general though.
So far so good tho. I rate it pretty highly to be honest. For a mobile game, despite some issues, it's not horridly predatory!
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(oh also 6: it's on both iOS and Android)
Now for the bad points:
1: yeaaah it's free as in microtransactions :|
2: the UI is... noisy, cluttered, messy. Lots of things wiggling and diverting attention obnoxiously...
3: (really this should be 2b honestly but) alongside this, the game feels... like it's constantly trying to RUSH you with things, like, text goes by too fast, things flash up a lot... the gameplay is normal, but outside of that, yikes. It's A Lot.