The multiplayer makes up for it a bit: you can pit yourselves against up to four friends in a battle to the death (not really) by seeing who can output the most food in the time limit. If you want them that badly, play the fun bits again.
#Games cooking mama free#
In fact, feel free to skip the supermarket entirely: it only offers the same rewards you can get in other parts of the game. Two things are hindering you though: your supermarket visit is on the clock, which means you have a limited amount of time before, we assume, Mama drives off in her SUV, leaving you stranded with the vegetable-buses and you fail at buying an apple and you are only allowed a limited number of collisions before you fail as well (we assume supermarket staff throw you out of the store for causing a ruckus). They stand there like vegetables or resolutely walk right into your path like buses, then have the gall to whinge and shout when you bump into them or they bump into you and they drop their stuff or their baby starts crying.Ĭue another minigame, in which you must fix the other person's problem (which was their own fault, the tantrum-throwing self-entitled eejits).
Unlike a real supermarket, though (and we don't know why we were thinking it might be, but let's just go with this here), other people don't organically move around when you're approaching. The idea is to run around the supermarket collecting the ingredients Mama needs to make her hellish witch's brews (there's something a little bit sinister about Mama, but more on that later). well, awful is probably the best way to put it. This is a new addition to the Cooking Mama franchise, and it's.
The real bummer in the gameplay is the Let's Shop mode. If you're going to get sick of the gameplay, an extra mode or two isn't going to make much difference and if you're not, well, the extra modes are welcome. The gameplay is just packaged slightly differently, and that's okay: the first is straight-up cooking, the second is cooking for mates, the third is throwing ingredients together to see what you come up with, and the fourth is the cooking contest, with either single player or multiplayer. But they'll give you content too, so they're not complete freeloaders.Īll in all, there's really not much difference between the first four modes. In addition, you can also unlock new 'friends' in the Practice-free Let's Cook mode, wherein you'll put your skills to the test by cooking and serving up your dishes to a bunch of virtual characters if they like your food, they'll recommend you to their (virtual) friends, who will then appear also clamouring for a feed. You can unlock new outfits and accessories in which to dress Mama in the Let's Get Fancy mode, kitchen decor and tools with which to gussy up your cooking space in the Change Design mode, and stickers with which to decorate the happy snaps of your culinary masterpieces in the Write in Diary mode. The better you make the dishes, the more unlockable content you'll have access to, and there is rather a lot of it. The warm glow of a job well done isn't the only reward for performing well. Especially when you consider that, for the first time in the franchise, Cooking Mama 3 does allow you to bounce back from your mistakes by cleaning up the mess and moving on. Not, we should add, that that's necessary - you're not penalised for stuffing up a recipe, and you can retry it as many times as you want, so in the end the 'Practice' mode seems like an odd inclusion. Once you figure it out, though - and the repertoire of steps is not enormous, repeating in different orders across multiple recipes - you'll be able to get the scores pretty much down pat, the only hindrance to perfect 100 scores every time being the occasionally obstreperous touch controls, and the 'Practice' mode within the Cook With Mama mode allows you to sneak-preview the steps in any order before taking on the actual recipe. For instance, we watched the timer ticking down in a state of frustration while poking at an unresponsive screen, unaware that the blue wind icon on meant we had to blow into the microphone to 'cool' the food. They're mostly pretty easy - stirring, chopping, weighing - but some of the tasks are a little more difficult, particularly when the instructions aren't adequately explained. Your score is calculated at the end based on how well you performed each of the steps.
Like its predecessors, Cooking Mama 3's core gameplay is simple: complete the steps of the recipe as quickly and neatly as you can though this latest incarnation adds a few more cooking steps all round.