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Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop Review for Nintendo DS

Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop Review for Nintendo DS

Chop-a-holic

Most folks will probably agree that Mama’s mannerisms in the kitchen still tend to be a little hot and cold. One minute she’s cheerfully praising your work with bubbly enthusiasm, and the next minute she’s literally spewing fireballs from her eyes in vitriolic contempt for the awful mess you’ve made for her meal-crafting instructions. Thankfully, she lives in the moment, flip-flopping her mood depending on your prowess and scores of individual tasks rather than focusing solely on the end result. Yes, Mama is back and she’s got a kitchen full of fresh recipes to hurl at you.

Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop screenshot

Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop offers up a third hearty helping of wholesome cuisine-preparing fun. It should come as a big surprise to anyone who’s followed the handheld cooking mini-game series thus far that Mama’s latest culinary installment on the DS doesn’t drop any bombshells or otherwise add any major last-minute menu changes to the familiar formula. It merely sprinkles in a few new flavors here and there in an attempt to keep patrons satisfied. Depending on your taste, it might not be enough to warrant placing another order, though Mama fans won’t be disappointed.

Food prep and digital cookery are still very much the core focus of Shop and Chop. The main Cook with Mama mode lets you dive right back into making tasty-looking virtual delights. As with past games, you’ll start out with a handful of recipes to test your skills before progressing to more challenging courses. Each meal throws a series of step-by-step food preparation mini-games that let you chop, peel, dice, strain, roll, broil, and grate your way into Mama’s good graces. All of your work is done under Mama’s watchful eye, and each task is closely scrutinized and rated on speed, accuracy, and efficiency. She doles out lots of praise when you do well and readily makes her displeasure known when you fail. You can still get by with shoddy cooking, but going back to strive for perfection and unlock extra goodies is still part of what makes the gameplay so addictive.

There are quite a few new recipes to try out and new mini-games to dig into. Heart-shaped marshmallows on a stick, candied apples, and pickles, are among some of the amusing snacks to craft, though there are plenty of bigger, more complicated meals from a wide variety of American and ethnic backgrounds to make. You can also combine random ingredients in Let’s Match mode to come up with other recipes with which to play around. Even when preparing familiar dishes, the mixture between carry-over activities from past games and new tasks is strong enough to keep your job in the kitchen relatively interesting. With 80 new dishes to create, you can expect to find a lot of variety from one meal to the next.

Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop screenshot

In keeping with the game’s title, Shop and Chop lets you take Mama to the supermarket to score the needed ingredients for her kitchen. This entertaining little diversion has you guiding Mama with the stylus through the maze-like isles of the store in search of specific staples, like meat, eggs, fish, and vegetables. You have a time limit to worry about and other obstacles to work around. There are shoppers and store staff also roaming the isles to contend with. Running into these folks forces you to engage in time-consuming mini-games that include taste-testing store samples, helping old ladies find certain grocery items, and returning flying goods to other shoppers’ carts. While it’s a cute addition, the stylus controls are not quite adequate.

Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop screenshot

Most of the other activities in Shop and Chop are carry-overs from past games. Cooking Contest mode lets you test your abilities in specific preparation skills like chopping, peeling, and grilling. You can play solo or wirelessly connect two DS systems to challenge friends if they also have a copy of the game. Let’s Cook mode, which appeared in Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends, has you preparing meals to be tasted and judged by Mama’s pals. Ingredient connectivity between Shop and Chop and Gardening Mama is a nice touch.

Mama’s kitchen is as upbeat and colorful as ever. You can unlock different clothing options and accessories to dress Mama up with, including stylish glasses, shirts, hairpieces, and more. The kitchen backdrops can be customized and designed to suit your fancy. The game’s cutesy, cheerful appearance is still pretty infectious. All of the food items are visually well-designed and many even look tasty. You might wind up with a grumbling stomach after extended play sessions. There are minor visual updates to recipes, menus, and mini-games that make a subtle difference, though Shop and Chop looks and plays a lot like the past installments.

Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop screenshot

The stylus-heavy controls haven’t always been the tightest aspect of Cooking Mama’s video game career, especially since you use touch control more than anything else. This time around many of the activities do feel a bit more precise and responsive than they have in the older games, which will be good news to Mama fans. You’ll still run across occasional mini-games that have somewhat confusing directions or take multiple tries to really get the gist of what you’re being asked to do, but it’s not a huge problem.

Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop is an adorable and entertaining title that will offer hours of virtual cooking enjoyment to anyone who hasn’t had their fill of the genre from the past two games. There’s always plenty of chopping and cooking to do even though the new shopping element is downplayed and isn’t integral to the gameplay. With more recipes, more mini-game tasks, a few additional side activities, and plenty of unlockables, there’s a lot to explore here. The problem is it’s all pretty much more of the same stuff you’ve already seen in the past few games. Without tempering your expectations against that hard fact, you’re probably going to be a little bummed by how similar this game is to its predecessors.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 3.9 Graphics
Cute, colorful, and bubbly. Minor updates and tweaks are subtle but pleasant. 3.8 Control
The controls feel a bit more responsive and generally tighter than earlier installments. 3.5 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Nothing says low budget like “even better than Mama!” It’s still somewhat charming. 4.0

Play Value
Lots of new recipes and activities are beefed up by the widest set of modes and features yet. A lot of re-hash material but it’s a pretty big sampling of stuff to do.

3.9 Overall Rating – Good
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.

Game Features:

  • Use the stylus as your ultimate cooking utensil to chop, grate, slice, stir, spread, sprinkle, roll, and much more in over 200 different mini-games.
  • Create 80 new recipes including: chili con carne, mushroom quiche, Eggs Benedict, tulip chicken, pumpkin gnocchi, and many more.
  • Six gameplay modes including new additions to the series.
  • Recipes progress from simple to complex, from small to large dishes, so do your best to meet Mama’s expectations and impress your friends. If your friends think your dish is delicious, you’ll unlock another new friend.

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