Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine

"What Could Have Been The Best Cooking Game Ever...falls incredibly short."

ALLEZ CUISINE!

Cooking Mama is a well established, somewhat well-regarded "cooking" game for the DS. I say cooking because well, it's really just a bunch of mini-games. You don't get to create your own recipes. Here comes what I would call it's first real "competitor"; Iron Chef America. The whole point of the Iron Chef show, if you haven't seen it, is to create a minimum of 4 dishes, all utilizing a "secret ingredient", that the competitors don't know until the actual competition starts. They all use that ingredient to make crazy sounding and, sometimes, looking dishes in order to defeat the Iron Chef that they have challenged. Sounds like a perfect platform to culinary creation? It's just Cooking Mama...with a lot less variety.

The game does not offer much of a career mode, it's basically just climb the "Iron Chef" ladder until you reach the "Final Battle". But along the way, you'll start noticing a ton of similarities. Sure, there is a lot of different secret ingredients, but you don't really get to cook that many things. It's basically a lot of the SAME EXACT RECIPES, with different ingredients. Pretty much, you can make anything into a lasagna, or ravioli, or pot pie or pizza or a few other things. Which means, even though it's a different recipe, you have to do the same exact mini-games over and over and over through this very short game. It pretty much destroys this game, because Cooking Mama has over 80 VERY different recipes to make. I hope you like chopping onions, because I must have chopped 200 while I played through this game.

Most of the mini games are insanely easy. The ones that aren't usually involve a problem with the touch screen. If you have to mix something in the stand mixer...just throw it on medium setting, you'll get a perfect every time. When you grill a hamburger, all you have to do is wait for a green exclamation point telling you it's done. You don't even have to flip it, it's already flipped. It's also missing a lot of mini-games. If you're making a pizza, somehow the step where you actually bake the pizza is missing. Ravioli? Apparently you don't need to boil it. Pot pie? Doesn't get baked either. You don't even have to prep a lot of ingredients. You don't have to peel potatoes, or prep the onion for chopping. You don't even get to set up the toppings on it on Pizza! When you plate you food at the end, if you do it fast (you can't make a mistake) and throw a few garnishes in real quick, you'll score perfect on that.

And another annoying thing is when you are making your dishes, you don't make one dish and then go to the next. The whole thing about Iron Chef is trying to be able to do a whole lot while a whole lot is going on. So they decided to rotate how you work through each dish. This works terribly. Sometimes you have to chop or grate or mince a whole bunch of the same ingredients while making dishes. And it makes for repetition in the mini-games. You might do 2 of the same thing in a row...instead of just combining the two tasks which would be less tedious.

There are only 6 different judges, none from the actual TV show (which has different guest judges each episode but you do see a lot of the same people). 2 of the judges are "food critics" waiting to destroy your culinary creations and the other is some stupid "Hollywood" critic who is about as dumb as a sack of bricks. On top of that, no matter how perfect you score, the judges invariably pick 1 dish of yours and give it RAVE reviews, and pick another dish which they will give TERRIBLE reviews on, even if you score a perfect score on "taste".

This game is extremely short. You can almost beat it in the time it takes to watch an episode of Iron Chef. You can "create your own Iron Chef" in the sense that you can pick if you want to be male or female. That's it. You cannot customize the character any further. There is really nothing to keep you playing once you beat this game, as you have already unlocked all the different secret ingredients, unless you want to get every medal and ribbon in the game, which do absolutely nothing. Sure it's nice to go up against Cat Cora, Morimoto and Mario Batali, but they have to make the same generic recipes as you do! Each one of them has their own style of cuisine, which does not show in this game at all.

While I applaud the fine folks at Destineer Games for trying, they simply missed the mark on TOO many parts of what makes Iron Chef, well...Iron Chef. A noble effort, but Cooking Mama blows away the Iron Chef.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/25/08

Game Release: Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine (US, 11/18/08)