Cooking Mama 5: Bon Appétit Is Best Installment Yet!

Cooking Mama 5: Bon Appétit is the latest installment in the Cooking Mama series, available exclusively on the Nintendo 3DS. While the game treads familiar ground, it's a worthy investment for gamers seeking an addictive virtual cooking experience!

The game's main premise is simple. Pick a recipe and follow each step from your mentor, Cooking Mama, carefully to delicately craft your delicious meal!

The game makes great use of the Nintendo 3DS's touch screen and stylus. It'll allow you to crack eggs, mix ingredients, chop veggies, grind meat, knead dough and so much more throughout the length of the game to create dishes from more than 60 recipes.

After each step, you'll be rewarded a bronze, silver, or gold medal. Points are tallied up once you've completed the whole recipe to give you a total score! Completing recipes also unlocks more recipes, plus mini-games and customizable goodies.

The game features more than 30 mini-games in total, grouped into the four categories of helping Mama in the store, in the garden, at home and at school. They may be simplistic, but they're fun and straightforward.

The game also gives you the option to customize pretty much everything in the kitchen, from Mama's bandana and apron, to the color of your appliances and utensils, to the furniture around the kitchen. The more you play, the more options you get, giving you a real incentive to play through and collect everything!

Cooking Mama 5 benefits from cute yet sleek graphics, and images of dishes you'll wish you'd made in real life. The voiceover work is cute, too, but it's limited, and can quickly get repetitive. The game also doesn't make a lot of use of the 3D effect available on the 3DS, but what it does do, showing off splatter effects and flying bits of food, is effective.

The game isn't particularly innovative in terms of the Cooking Mama series, but it takes what's right from the past games and moves ahead with fun gameplay and enough new recipes to keep gamers entertained, making it the best game yet in the series. It sticks with a tried and true formula, and there's nothing wrong with that. Learn more about the game at their official website here!

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Also be sure to read our reviews of the Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS demo, and How To Train Your Dragon 2!

Disclaimer: Sweety High received a free copy of  Cooking Mama 5: Bon Appétit for review.