GDC: Cooking Star First Look

By Matt Dunn, USA
for www.touchgen.com

Published: March 26, 2009

Cooking Mama, meet your match.

Cooking games are all the rage these days. I’m not quite sure why, but it’s definitely not a bad thing (unless you’re a hungry gamer). The general feel of most of these games is pretty much the same: combine a bunch of quick cooking mini games into one app. Cooking Star from Glu Mobile one-ups it’s competition in a few different ways.

Cooking Star looks a lot like the other cooking games. It’s got a great colorful anime style, with some great animation to boot. The audio adds to the experience. The visual style of the game, although similar to others, is still top notch.

There are 8 mini games to compliment the story mode when you buy the launch game, but Glu promises to release about 2 new mini-games every few weeks to add to the bunch. The mini-games themselves range from Rice Balls to Kabob, to Burgers, to Tofu, and beyond, so there’s a mix of Asian style food along with others. You’ll be chopping tofu, flipping kabob’s, and stacking burgers to name a few. To complete a mini-game, you must complete all five difficulty levels. When this is done, the game unlocks a REAL recipe for food! Yes, these are actual recipes the Glu has tested for genuine goodness at their own expense.

Aside from real recipes, Cooking Star will also feature a daily special, which will have you complete a random set of the current mini-games. Like a daily special at a restaurant, this will change every day. Finally, once you complete all difficulties of a game, you will be able to go back and play it in challenge mode to compete against previous high scores.

All in all, Cooking Star is looking to be quite a full experience, and even though cooking games aren’t my thing, it looks too charming to pass up. You can expect Cooking Star to be released around mid April, for $2.99.

Review disclosure: Any games reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note: the resulting review score is never impeded by this fact, all opinions are that of the TouchGen reviewer and not the developer. This is in keeping with our O.A.T.S oath. Read more about O.A.T.S here

GDC: Cooking Star First Look

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