Toca Kitchen 2 Review

Developer: Toca Boca AB
Price: $2.99
Version Reviewed: 1.2
Device Reviewed On: iPhone 5

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Learning where your food comes from and how to prepare it properly is an important part of education for children. Generally, knowledge means healthier eating practices. Toca Kitchen 2 is a little lighter than that, focusing on messing around with food more so than following a recipe, but it provides some sensible foundations.

It’s a very open ended educational game. You can do what you like, for the most part. On one side of the screen are the ingredients, including things such as spaghetti, carrots, potatoes, various kinds of meat, and watermelons. You can serve up food by dragging it onto your character’s plate, feeding it to them raw, but the fun comes through cooking it.

Drag the item to the right and you can choose to boil it, oven bake, juice it, or even deep fat fry it. It’s easy to accomplish such things, with you then able to add seasoning or sauces to your concoctions. In each case, you see the food item change in look, thanks to it being baked or simply covered in tasty batter.

You can choose to feed your character something really tasty, but a lot of the fun comes in seeing their reactions when you give them something unpleasant, such as a watermelon covered in ketchup. Toca Kitchen 2 keeps it light in that way, always giving kids something new to spark their imagination.

They’ll end up wishing they could form sandwiches or do more convoluted things with the food, but it’s still a fairly charming app to check out. It’s the kind of thing you can easily entertain your kids with while you’re on the move, made all the better by the small screen space of the iPhone hardly affecting things at all. A few more educational details wouldn’t have gone amiss, but it really is rather fun.