Cooking Mama Let’s Cook! Review

Developer: Office Create Corp.
Price: FREE
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5

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Mama is back, again, with Papa in tow. This time she’s got a new free-to-play game that’s… well it exists.

Cooking Mama Let’s Cook! is classic Mama for the most part. You get to select from a small assortment of dishes, and perform all sorts of gesture-based actions on the touch screen to try and complete various steps of each recipe. If you fail to pull a single step off perfectly it’s going to torpedo your chances at a three-star rating, but you can always start fro scratch. Or spend a precious continue token (I don’t know what their actual name is) to try a failed task again.

You can also feed your dishes to Papa, who will give you a separate heart rating (which pretty much mirrors your star rating), and if you impress him enough he’ll give you more continues. You can also earn stuff if you complete three different daily tasks for him.

My problem with all of this is threefold. First, because of the freemium nature of Cooking Mama Let’s Cook! there aren’t a whole lot of recipes to play around with unless you want to buy recipe packs from the shop with real money. You can replay completed 3-star recipes at a higher difficulty, and combine finished recipes for added challenge, at least.

Second, some of the icons in the menus and while cooking aren’t particularly intuitive (a white flag for Daily Challenges? Really?). Third, the touch screen controls aren’t always accurate. Most of the time they work well, but a few tasks like frosting cupcakes will fail and you’ll have no idea why. Seriously, I hate frosting those stupid cupcakes.

If you’re a fan of Mama, Cooking Mama Let’s Cook is a decent approximation of the DS versions. It’s nowhere close to a replacement, though. However, if you’re new to the series it’s a reasonably good place to start with no financial risk whatsoever.