Much like the show, Supreme Cuisine places you in a series of competitive cooking battles against a lengthy parade of different Iron Chefs. You’re given a secret ingredient for each challenge and can pick from an array of appropriately themed dishes. From there, you’ll engage in a series of Cooking Mama-style food preparation mini-games until all of your dishes are complete. Then there’s a cutscene, an arbitrary score session, and the announcement of a winner (it’s most likely going to be you throughout the entire game, unless you really suck). After that, it’s on to the next battle. Within the first few brief competitions, repetition sets in.

Anyone who’s played Cooking Mama before will find nothing particularly new or exciting about the gameplay here. Supreme Cuisine requires you to wield the Wii Remote to mimic various actions in a series of short mini-games following the basic steps required to produce each of the dishes you’ve selected for a particular battle. You’ll chop, boil, slice, carve, grate, pour, mix, stir, sauté, roll, grill, dip, ladle, and engage in other similar repetitive motions to complete your recipe. While the Wii Remote is generally responsive, the mini-games get boring rather quickly. You’ll often be repeating the same few steps for different dishes over and over again from battle to battle. After all the dishes in a challenge are complete, you’ll have to go through the task of arranging the food on the plate – an unexciting process that seems to have little bearing on the final result.

Though some of the specific steps in preparing dishes can be challenging to pull off (mostly due to the control sensitivity), it’s very hard not to win every battle in the game. The real challenge is mustering the effort to press onward through more than a dozen dull battles. Unlockable medals seem tacked on as an afterthought, and the multiplayer component has players taking turns doing the same repetitive actions from the main game. The most frustrating problem throughout the game is there’s really no way to tell what the criteria you’re being judged on really is. Sure, you’re scored in three categories, but there’s really no way to discern how your in-game actions affect the outcome – aside from doing really well or really poorly.

Supreme Cuisine could have been a great opportunity to bring the excitement and entertainingly tense cooking battles in kitchen stadium to life on the Wii. Instead, the game provides an uninspiring, and frankly boring, culinary mini-game experience that apes Cooking Mama without including some of the more fun aspects of the cooking video game genre.

By Nathan Meunier
CCC Staff Contibutor