Cooking Mama (iPhone)

Once when I was a toddler, I decided to cook breakfast for the family. I got together some plastic toy pots, put a stool next to the oven so I could reach the hobs and set about cooking. As the plastic melted and the kitchen began to fill with smoke I started to suspect that something had gone awry.

Fortunately, Cooking Mama won't melt anything but your heart with its casual cooking lessons steeped in charm. This mini-game-filled treat is more of a snack than full meal, though, skimping on the serving with a paltry 15 recipes to prepare.

The recipes range from shrimp tempura to cupcakes. Each section of the recipe is well-suited to what you're cooking, too, so for the shrimp tempura you de-shell the shrimp, make the batter, bathe the shrimp in it, then dip them in the deep fryer. You're ranked on your performance in each of these, then you're given a score out of 100 for the full recipe.

The games use touch and tilt controls for chopping, mixing, grinding, and garnishing. Although relatively few of the cooking games are exact repetitions of ones you've already played in another recipe, they're almost all iterations on 17 core actions. In the Cooking Contest mode, you can test these skills separately through three increasing difficulty levels.

Most of these actions are self-explanatory. When a carrot appears, it's easy to figure out that tapping it chops it up. You might be confused by some of the games at first, since you're occasionally given instructions without being told exactly where to swipe or tap, but for the most part it's straightforward.

A Practice mode that allows you to play any section of an unlocked recipe separately means any confusion is short-lived.

The visuals help make the game intuitive, too. They're cute, bold and colourful. There are nice visual cues, like how a stew will change colour and start bubbling as you add ingredients and turn up the heat. Fail to cook your dishes properly and the colour turns nasty, letting you know that something is amiss.

Forgiving difficulty levels and the cartoony graphics team up to make Cooking Mama a well-intended game that just wills you to smile even if you have no interest in cooking. Unfortunately, its brevity keeps you from staying in the kitchen for long.

A few more than a dozen recipes is hardly enough to satisfy any portable gaming appetite. There's plenty of room to double, triple, even quadruple the number of dishes here and still keep the file size reasonable for iPhones on a megabyte diet. The replay value is already questionable without lowering the number of dishes on offer.

As such, Cooking Mama plates up a tiny bite that needs a follow up course. It's well-made and nicely presented, but needs to fill up on gameplay if it hopes to drain your wallet.