Cooking Mama
Review

Cooking Mama (2006): Cuisine! is the latest game in the long-running series of stylised cooking puzzle games where you complete recipe minigames to cook various dishes. From mixing ingredients in a bowl to deep frying the food, you mirror on-screen instructions to create sweet and savoury dishes. The easy-to-follow steps, quick gameplay loop, and real-life foods make it a fun way for youngsters (and young at heart) to cook and bake.

The setup is the same in each game. You're given some ingredients and follow along with the instructions to carry out the steps in the recipes. These can range from rolling doughnuts in sugar, to chopping up meat and vegetable, to adding flour and baking powder to a mixing bowl. In Cooking Mama: Cuisine! on the Switch, like the DS and 3DS versions, you use touch controls to slice, roll, and combine the ingredients. After each step is performed, you get a rank. Do well all the way through and you can unlock new recipes and ingredients to use and create with.

The result is a longstanding and really fun (beloved, as Disney would say) series that introduces the basics of cookery through simple tasks. It's a novel way for young children to engage in the essential skill for the first time.

There have been lots of games in the Cooking Mama series, all offering a similar gameplay experience but with varying recipes and ingredients to pick from, with some also offering local multiplayer games, like a speed-chopping competition. Some spin-off games room the sea formula of short and simple tasks but applied them to other settings:

• Cooking Mama (2006) DS and iOS
• Cooking Mama: Cook Off (2007) Wii
• Cooking Mama 2: Cooking With Friends (2007) DS
• Cooking Mama: World Kitchen (2008) Wii
• Gardening Mama (2009) DS - Gardening spin-off.
• Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop (2009) DS
• Crafting Mama (2010) DS - Crafting spin-off.
• Babysitting Mama (2011) Wii - Babysitting spin-off with a real baby toy to put the Wii Remote in.
• Camping Mama: Outdoor Adventures (2011) DS
• Cooking Mama 4: Cooking Magic (2011) 3DS
• Gardening Mama 2: Forest Friends (2013) 3DS
• Cooking Mama 5: Bon Appétit! (2013) 3DS
• Cooking Mama: Let's Cook (2015) iOS and Android
• Cooking Mama Sweet Shop (2017) 3DS
• Cooking Mama: Cuisine! (2022) iOS Apple Arcade.

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Cooking Mama 10 months ago. It was re-examined by Andy Robertson and updated 4 weeks ago.