Cooking Mama: Cookstar (Switch)

On the surface, Cooking Mama: Cookstar seems like it’s just the latest installment in the colorful and accessible cooking sim series starring its supportive and smiling lead character Mama. However, this innocuous looking game has a surprisingly sketchy history behind its release. Thrown up abruptly on the Nintendo eShop and taken down just as quickly, rumors spread that this strange release tied into the game potentially using Switch systems as bitcoin miners. As rumors the game contained malware that could overheat your Switch spread, the game developed a level of infamy that lead to an overblown reputation for being something sinister. The truth of the matter was that publisher Planet Entertainment and Office Create, the rights holders for the Cooking Mama brand, disagreed on whether the game was of sufficient quality for release, and after Planet Entertainment breached its contract and released it anyway, Office Create had the game pulled from shelves and digital storefronts.

All of this scuttlebutt about Cooking Mama: Cookstar being scandalous made it perhaps one of the most notable entries in a fairly large franchise, but if you do manage to get your hands on a copy of one of the games that did make it to store shelves before Office Create pulled the plug, you can start to see why Office Create wanted the game to have a little more development time.

Cooking Mama: Cookstar pretty much does the bare minimum for structuring how you will take on its set of 80+ recipes. Opening up either the traditional cooking or vegetarian recipe menus, you’ll see the set of recipes you have unlocked, the player unlocking a new recipe in that menu once they’ve completed one they already have access to. Progression through the game is literally going down the list of recipes you have and choosing to do them, your options growing at a slow pace and without any risk or fanfare involved in making it further. Completing a recipe doesn’t mean doing it well, since even if you fail every step of the process, Mama swoops in and sets things right so you can continue to work on the food. No matter your score, you’ll keep moving along the list to the next item unimpeded, the time investment the only thing required to get the next meal for you to make.

There is a decent diversity to be found in what foods you make in Cooking Mama: Cookstar. Cookies, soup, cake, gyros, lasagna, pizza, burritos, hamburgers, and cinnamon rolls make up some easily recognizable dishes, and the game gets a little colorful with concepts like Grilled Cheese with a rainbow coloration and something it calls a Galaxy Smoothie that uses unique color mixing to look special. Plenty of Japanese food makes the cut as well, mochi, sushi, and soba noodles all included as dishes to create, but the vegetarian options are a little slight compared to the regular meals and unfortunately, many of them are just meatless versions of regular recipes, meaning you can cut down the recipe total a fair bit if you’re talking about unique concepts. Since making the version with or without meat usually just involves a step being changed or removed, having to play the recipe again in the vegetarian menu to unlock more recipes can be quite repetitive, and while making two similar dishes may sound like not too much of an ask normally, many recipes share similar preparation steps so you’ll have repetition from other dishes weighing down the food prep you are performing repeatedly.

Cooking Mama: Cookstar does a somewhat thorough job of having you do the necessary steps for a meal, and because of this, you’ll be doing things like slicing up veggies, grating cheese, cracking eggs, and sticking things into ovens over and over again. By the time you’ve completed your first recipe you’ve seen a fair number of the steps you’ll be repeating constantly across the different meals, and while sometimes you get to do something unique or rare like smashing a bag of spicy chips with a tenderizer, you’re much more likely to do the same few minigames across most of the recipes. This is an unfortunate reality of real cooking, although that task isn’t really done for enjoyment, and that process has one distinct advantage over Cooking Mama: Cookstar: responsiveness.

If this game was simply an unimaginative cooking sim, it would be repetitive and grow stale rather quickly, but the game attempts to bring the Switch’s motion controls into it and does so poorly. While the DS and Wii iterations of the series relied on the touch screen and motion controls for their cooking, that was done to make them accessible and sort of visceral. Here, tapping an egg against a bowl just right by moving your joycon with the right amount of force is a crap shoot. It’s really hard to determine what the game will determine to be too weak to even leave a small crack and strong enough to shatter the egg all over your screen. If you’re peeling leaves off a head of lettuce, it’s easy to have the game register it as too soft to work or strong enough to hurl it across the kitchen. Cut and dry tasks like chopping up ingredients don’t struggle as much because it simply sees to check if you’re moving the controller up and down enough, and the shallower and more simplistic an action is, the more likely it is to be easily executed and forgotten. Sometimes it just has regular button and joysticks controls get involved instead that are simple enough to execute as well. However, having most of the challenge in making a dish tied to whether or not your controller is cooperating with the game’s bad movement detection sours almost every bit of food prep available. Perhaps the most excruciating part is opening cans with your can opener, the action almost always seeming to struggle to work properly and the best hope you have is to wave it wildly and retrieve your can opener when it inevitably goes flying. You can play in handheld mode to switch to exclusively button controls and touchscreen inputs, but at that point there is no challenge left or anything immersive about the cooking to buoy the incredibly dry and repetitive tasks.

Surprisingly, while Mama will swoop in and salvage any dish you made errors on, the game does have a fairly good timer in place for each cooking step. There’s very little room to mess up when it comes to the time you have available, which could be a good way of keeping things challenging in a less lenient and better built cooking game. The can opening minigame in particular is such a drag because the controller struggles to pick up your actions as you go up against such a harsh clock, and while popping an item in and out of the oven isn’t likely going to run up against issues, they do account for it by having a sweet spot on a meter for when to take it out rather than it being about doing things in a limited amount of time. Some things like grilling on a skillet are slow though, the process taking the shape of a few events that need to be performed in time windows that are too generous and only involve something like flipping the meat or turning down the heat. I can’t fault the idea of the time crunch, but it seems to harm things more than help since it makes the ones that involve motion controls more agonizing and doesn’t really contribute to the easier minigames.

Failing to do a step properly does end up impacting your score, the only metric the game uses to fault you or reward you for a job well done. It may tie into the unlockables for the kitchen as well, these only being new clothes for Mama or different colors for your utensils so even that feels like a weak reward for continuing to play. Your score is mostly there to shoot for as a personal goal even though it’s pretty easy to get a near perfect score provided you don’t run into motion control woes. Essentially, food prep is either going to be too easy or bogged down by technical problems, and watching Mama break dance or do the chicken dance to celebrate a high score is cute but not worth the strife. Your score is contextualized as some sort of rating system based on a fictional social media service where people can give multiple likes to a dish. Each person, be they a regular human, clown, gerbil, or Mama herself, gives likes equivalent to the points you earned for each step of the meal prep. You know based on a different three star rating system on whether you succeeded perfectly at the cooking step already though, so it feels a little muddled trying to squeeze in the social media aspect as well.

Where it does come more into play though is that each meal’s last step is to take a picture of it for that social media service. You can skip most of this step, but this allows you to get creative with how you plate your food. It will usually come somewhat set out already and can’t be altered too much, but you can add more toppings, garnishes, or sides to the plate to make it look nicer. Cooking Mama: Cookstar allows you to make some rather nice looking meals you can punch up with filters and stickers, but you can get silly with it as well, doing things like piling on additional french fries until the game struggles to handle the physics or you can make an impossible diagonal tower of stacked toppings to give your food a strange unicorn horn of garnishes. Hearing Mama’s heavy Japanese accent dish out phrases like “Flex for the ‘gram” and “Pics or it didn’t happen” gives the process a sort of ironic enjoyment as well, but the smiling face of the cook and her commentary is usually a pretty nice touch to prevent things from being too spartan. Her feedback while making food quickly becomes repetitive though as she has very little to say beyond the same small set of platitudes, and she is intensely annoying on the menu screens, seeming to yawn if you take even a second to read what cooking step is next or constantly pressuring you to get going as she seems to be bored with her own game.

A laughable multiplayer component exists where two players can struggle simultaneously with the motion controls in bland competitions. These are mostly things like who can spin pizza dough better in a time limit or peel more potatoes during a time crunch, but some aren’t just repeating an action over and over better than the other player. You can play a game where you try and tenderize some food with a hammer while the other player drags it around, it fairly hard to ever hit it if the other player is even mildly attentive, or you can work together to make moshi, one player being the hand kneading it and the other smashing it with the rhythm of alternation being the only thing you need to consider. It certainly feels like it was tacked on with little thought, but in a game where little thought went into adding depth to any part of the experience, it at least manages to fit right in in terms of its low quality.

THE VERDICT: Cooking Mama: Cookstar is fortunate it had a strange controversy arise around its release, because otherwise its only claim to fame would be being a forgettable and frustrating cooking sim. Motion controls constantly impede your ability to perform tasks, and when you do use buttons instead, the food prep instead becomes far too easy and dull for it. Failure only impedes a mostly meaningless rating system and progress is just about going from one recipe to the next, and even the game’s charming quirks can be ruined when the meme-spouting Mama decides she never wants to stop talking. Considering the game grows stale the second you start your second recipe, it’s not hard to see why Office Create didn’t want this reaching the hands of the gaming public.

And so, I give Cooking Mama: Cookstar for Nintendo Switch…

A TERRIBLE rating. While a game like Waku Waku Sweets may have cooking that’s about as plain as Cooking Mama: Cookstar, it quite wisely had its focus truly be on the life sim aspects. Cooking Mama: Cookstar is all about the food prep exclusively and the game barely tries to make that engaging. Awfully implemented motion controls are the only part of making a meal that really puts up a fight, and that’s mostly because you’ll struggle to have your inputs ready properly. Failure isn’t much to worry about either, the game barely caring if you succeed or not as it pushes you through to the next recipe made up of many of the same generic steps with little imagination put into how you execute them. The motion control steps can’t be immersive because they barely work and the button controls aren’t complex enough to make cooking entertaining, so Cooking Mama: Cookstar ends up putting all its eggs in one basket that has a hole cut out of the bottom. Having some decent options for taking pictures of your food certainly isn’t going to help the game shine, especially when it doesn’t feel like that’s the meal you made yourself on the plate. It’s what Mama pushed through if you weren’t up to snuff, and having it attached to the end of every recipe makes it lose its luster as it gets harder and harder to be interested in making things like macaroni and cheese look presentable for a fictional hamster who is only going to rate it on how well you poured it out of the pot during a specific cooking step.

While it’s definitely not what a family-friendly series wants to be known for, Cooking Mama: Cookstar will always be remembered for the rumor mill surrounding its strange disappearance. Whether letting a terrible game hit store shelves or sparking rumors of bitcoin mining is more damaging to the brand we can never truly know, but it at least adds an interesting tale to a video game that didn’t have that much going for it.