Cake Mania import review (DS)

The DS is not short of puzzle games, that’s for sure. That Cake Mania, and it’s included expansion pack Back to the Bakery, began life on the PC a while back could make many people nervous of this baked goods-based game. It’s just another point-and-click port, isn’t it? Yes it is, but this time that’s not a bad thing.

Any port in a storm

The plot of Cake Mania is simple enough. You play Jill, a graduate of culinary school. Your grandparents’ bakery is threatened by nasty property developers. Rather than call in the A-Team (my own personal first choice), you decide to bake your way out of trouble. Make your cake shop a success and the old folks can rest easy.

Starting with the basics – an oven and an icing machine – you must bake and decorate cakes before your customers get bored of waiting and leave. Hit your monthly earnings target and you progress. Miss and you lose a life. Lose all your lives and it’s game over. Simple.

Each month brings themed customers, Easter Bunnies or Santa Clause for example, and these customers have differing patience thresholds (indicated by decreasing hearts over their heads) and occasionally a different effect on other customers in the line. Vampires make your customers uncomfortable and want to leave sooner, while Santa makes them happy. No explanation of why vampires like cake is ever offered.

As you earn money you can add ovens, more icing machines, cake decoration machines, and even a TV and a muffin micro-wave. Both of these distract customers and keep them from leaving. You can even buy shoes that make you dash around your kitchen faster.

Caked in it

As with the best puzzle games, things start slowly and build up. The simple game play is satisfying enough, the difficulty curve is pretty good, and the levels are relatively short to play. The combination of those ingredients creates the ‘one more go’ mentality that is the Mecca for all games of this ilk.

Initially, you bake one of four basic cake shapes and ice them in one of four colours. There can be up to four customers at any one time. After a short while, you’ll add cake decorations to your menu (up to), as well as having to create multi-layered cakes. By the end, you’ll have three ovens, the muffin maker, a TV, a cake stand on the central table, eight variations of cake topper – four on each of your two decorating machines – and three icing machines. Things get very hectic, potentially great fun, and horribly problematic.

Where’d it go?

The look of Cake Mania is nice and bright and colourful, but a little fuzzy in exactly the wrong places. It can be difficult sometimes to see what type of cake the customers want when they place their pictorial orders, and errors can quickly become cataclysmically expensive. Experience will get you used to this little ‘quirk’ but, in the chaos of the latter levels, you will make mistakes that you will feel are not your own. This is especially the case when you reach the multi-layered cakes.

The bottom screen scrolls slightly as you move about the kitchen, and this can lead to moments when, for example, you try to tap on a particular colour of icing, hit the wrong one, and end up with something that has to go into the bin. The tiny cake decorations you have to accurately tap are a real pain too.

Ultimately, the gameplay is pretty samey, but the learning curve means you won’t really mind. However, finish the main game and its same-again expansion pack and you will find you have no real desire to go back and start again. Oh, and there’s no multiplayer!!!

Mania? Hmmm...

Cake Mania is, despite sharing the whole food motif, very different from the likes of Cooking Mama – a far more hardcore experience. This is a simpler game, better suited to general consumption, and isn’t bad for it. The control issues will kill interest in all but the most determined casual gamer, however, and the graphics will cause even those with 20/20 vision to squint from time to time.

It’s a tasty little game, but you’ll finish it very quickly and still feel hungry.

(Damn, promised myself I wouldn’t do that line…)