Previews

Hands-on with Cooking Mama meets George Romero freemium title Zombie Cookin’

Brain flakes

Hands-on with Cooking Mama meets George Romero freemium title Zombie Cookin’
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iOS
| Zombie Cookin'

Zombies aren’t exactly known for their culinary skills. Given that most appear to eat human brains for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it’s a little surprising to see that Capcom's mobile brand Beeline has decided to choose the living dead for its upcoming freemium title Zombie Cookin’.

That is until you see some of the pun-tastic recipes on offer. “Scrambled Legs” anyone?

But there’s more to this title than just forehead-slapping puns (even if that is a big draw for me personally). The mixture of lightning-quick mini-games and a manic sense of humour suggest that Zombie Cookin’ has more brains than it's letting on.

Braaains

You’re initially recruited to create the appealing-sounding Stu’s Brain Stew to serve your hungry zombie, before unlocking progressively harder and grander meals as the game goes on.

Rather than spend the game planting crops and sitting on your rotting hands all day, Zombie Cookin’ makes you get down and dirty in the kitchen with the ingredients – slicing, dicing, and – er – plucking the various items so they’re ready for a nosh.

Each ingredient and dish has its own little mini-game. Much as with Cooking Mama, you’ll therefore be slicing carrots by swiping the screen, peeling potatoes (with a razor, for some reason), and slicing downwards to peel off a skull before picking the brain up and popping it in the bask-wait.

What?

Braaains!

Given that you’ll be working in a flea-infested Kitchen of the Dead, there are no cheery tomatoes or broccoli for you to happily and safely slice.

While you will occasionally have to throw in some vegetables, like the aforementioned potatoes (zombies need carbohydrates, too), they’re all exclusively rotten or filled with squirming worms.

Then there are the mini-games themselves, which start off simple and derivative but don’t take long to get refreshingly hard. Breaking rotten eggs, for instance, requires gently shaking the iPhone before quickly pulling the two halves of the shell apart on screen – all against a fairly harsh time limit.

Get a better grade in the preparation and you’ll have the chance to master a dish, giving you more cash to spend later on more advanced recipes and dressing up your zombie in some fetching threads.

Fine, I’ll have the eggs benedict

While the food cooks (here’s where the freemium element comes in), you can perform a variety of other tasks to help you level-up and gain access to even more activities.

Along with the customisation of your zombie (which includes altering his or her eyes and mouth as well as clothes) you also can gather more ingredients for future dishes by employing your ‘zombie horde’ – accessed by smashing down the wooden barricades on the window – as fetchers.

The waiting time between meals is bound to put off those purely looking for a off-beat, touchscreen-optimised collection of bizarre and weird mini-games, but there’s certainly life in this freemium recipe.

Zombie Cookin’ will be out at a time to be determined.
Will Wilson
Will Wilson
Will's obsession with gaming started off with sketching Laser Squad levels on pads of paper, but recently grew into violently shouting "Tango Down!" at random strangers on the street. He now directs that positive energy into his writing (due in no small part to a binding court order).