The very successful DS Cooking Game gets ported for the iPhone. Does it have goods to take on the competition?

Cooking Mama ($6.99)

Whether you’re a great cook or completely suck at it, we’re sure you’ve heard of Cooking Mama. It’s a game where you prepare ingredients and actually cook them for a variety of menu items. You can chop, bake, mix and so much more. With cool graphics and multitouch controls, Cooking Mama is an excellent fit for the iPhone. We’re ditching the stylus and going touch screen, how is that not mouth watering?

Gameplay

In the iPhone version of Cooking Mama, it comes with single player and cook face off modes. You can still practice cooking a menu item or just go directly to full on scored mode.

Starting cooking can’t be any easier. Simply tap Let’s cook and you get the full array of items you can cook:

Tapping any of the recipes pulls up a choice between Practice or Make. Either choices gives you each step necessary to complete the recipe.

It can start off with putting ingredients to a mixer of chopping vegetables:

The recipes usually include about 10 steps to complete it. You are graded based on each step completion (green chop bars above OR baking agility bar). The process repeats itself through different recipes ranging from appetizers to deserts.

Touch Me

Cooking Mama for the iPhone definitely works miles better than it does for the DS. All controls for Cooking Mama either utilizes multi touch controls or accelerometer. Instructional arrows are included to guide you along the way:

In the screenshot shown above, you see two arrowheads meaning you have to touch up and down near the shrimp’s head to release it. Cooking Mama then guides you to completely peel of the shrimp. The grade is evaluated depending on requested number completion which on our case is 3 shrimps.

Cooking Techniques

There’s a whole lot of cooking techniques Cooking Mama comes with. Let’s start off with sauteing (sp?). Sauteing uses accelerometer controls. From lathering the pan with batter to actually mixing garlic, onions and other ingredients:

You get to also fry stuff:

And wrap some mochi’s or design your own cupcakes:

The keys are: to watch the status bars above the chopping board, watch time on top left of screen and follow directional arrows of coure. Everything should be intuitive and fun!

Conclusion

The game comes with a steep price but that probably comes with the Cooking Mama franchise licensing. Do not worry though as the game is still as fun (if not better) from the DS version which roughly costs around $19.99 – $49.99 depending on the version you get. For $6.99, you ARE getting a damn great deal!

The only thing we can really suggest is to keep adding more recipes. Cooking Mama can also include goal oriented modes where customers order three or four menu items, and you need to cook it in under 5 minutes or less.

Cooking Mama is really fun, and we recommend you get it. Just a hint of warning though: do NOT fire up Cooking Mama while you’re hungry… The food and recipe items look so tasty you might not help yourself into actually buying stuff you cook in real life. We know we did!