Cooking Mama: Cook Off Critic Reviews

A great family game that gets everyone involved.

Superbly utilizing the unique features of the Wii remote, this game is highly recommended for all ages, sexes and levels of experience. You can almost smell the food cooking, the only regret is you can't taste it.

Cooking Mama: Cook Off, like a good meal, is best shared with friends.

Best played in short bursts. The game is nowhere near as deep as what many have grown accustomed to and is over in a few hours if you just sit down and chew through each of the cooking challenges.

Ultimately Cook Off's combination of improved variety, a better interface and multiplayer gameplay were an easy decision over the DS's stylus controls, solo-only play and limited palette -- and palate.

Breaking up recipes into several steps, each its own minigame, is an enjoyably elegant gameplay mechanism; it works particularly well here on the Wii.

More importantly, Cook Off doesn't fix the one glaring flaw of the DS game: There's still no story/career/arcade mode to sink your teeth into--just a bunch of individual recipes.

This isn't a kitchen nightmare, but nor is it a triumph.

The clever controls, resourceful objectives (there are dozens of unique recipes), and moderately high replay value are a winning combination.

Cooking mama's game design just doesn't carry its weight; it can't seem to decide if it wants to be a cooking sim for grown-up food geeks or a party game for kids, and the result is an excersize in frustration for both groups.

Cooking Mama: Cook-Off is a good idea that just hasn’t been done well here. The game’s controls just don’t work as they should.

As it stands now, the cartoony graphics don’t really make you hungry or even make you feel like you actually made food, nor is the game ridiculous enough to give you that silly kind of fun like WarioWare. Any future entry in this series will probably have to go one of those two ways.

At its worst, however, Cooking Mama is enough to make you want to throw your Wiimote at the screen as the game struggles to recognize the commands that you give it.

It's wildly entertaining for about 90 minutes. After that, even real cooking starts to make more sense.

Cute and fun minigames, for the most part, but lacking drive or motivation for the player, with different tasks getting repetitive quickly.

It's the gaming equivalent of a local neighborhood eatery: the food's good and service is decent, but it certainly won't be the best meal you've ever had.

It’s a niche game that most won’t like but a few will devour.

Cooking Mama: Cook Off has its moments, such as in multiplayer, in which most players will end up on the same level playing field, partly due to some of the flaws of the gameplay mechanic. It seems as though Taito wanted to get a Wii version out quickly, and we wish it hadn't.

The cute animations and theme music are perfect for little ones. I think it is far more engaging and educational than Dora or anything else on Noggin. For the adult gamer, don't expect this to be anything more than a simple diversion for an hour or two.

Unfortunately, perfecting one's craft requires much trial and error, thanks to the game's shoddy motion controls. Things work ok most of the time, but like the DS version, every once and a while the game fails to register the simplest of actions.