Cooking Mama: Cook Off review

It’s good to see what you’re aiming for with each dish, and it spices up the gameplay a little to make it competitive. Strange, then, that multiplayer against a second real human player seems entirely redundant and broken. Somewhere into the third minigame of an eight-game dish, the two of you will pause, look at each other and say, “What the hell are we doing?”

Fundamentally this is a game that seems to lack motivation. Get the best times in some dishes and you unlock more of them to practice, which then unlocks more competitors for you to beat, in an endlessly repetitive swirl of cucumber-chopping and egg-cracking mimicry.