Cooking Academy
by The Downloadable Beast!
(DB HQ)
Quick verdict
Game:
Cooking Academy
Download from:
GameHouse (FULL FREE version when you open a FREE trial Fun Tickets account!
Rating:
3.5/5
Cooking Academy is quite a fun concept. If your teenage son or daughter has not yet learned anything about cooking, this game could actually teach them some good basics!
What's it about?
You check yourself into the academy with the goal of becoming a top chef. But the road to culinary perfection is long and repetitive (just like the real career!).
Starting with appetisers, you move through the recipe book, learning how to cook all kinds of dishes.
This is essentially a collection of mini-games, all related to preparation and cooking of food to order.
You have to prepare all the ingredients for each dish, which might mean slicing and dicing, peeling, chopping, breaking eggs into a bowl and so on.
Once prepared, you mix the ingredients in the prescribed order. Then the cooking phase, which varies a lot depending on whether you are cooking an omelette, say, or broiled fish.
You are awarded points for each stage. One mistake will cost you dearly, so it's better to be slow and sure than super-fast and sloppy. You do get points for speed, IF you can achieve perfection, so there is an incentive to do things well and quickly too.
At the end of each level, you must pass exams. Most are just variations on jobs you have already done, with targets to hit within 60 seconds. You must pass your exams before moving on to learn the next type of cooking.
Other downloadable or online skill games you might enjoy!
Cookie Rookie
Cooking Academy
Kalorie King
Peggle game
Peggle Nights
Polar Bear game
Saints and Sinners Bowling
Skip Bo Castaway Caper
Supercow game
Play skill games for fun or REAL CASH online at King!
Pros and cons
+ Fun concept, well executed.
+ Can actually teach you about cooking: games CAN be educational, even by stealth!
+ Good variety of mini games, however...
- ...the mini games are pretty repetitive.
- Boys will probably regard this as a girlie game. It's not really true, but perception can be very powerful in the teenage age group this game is aimed at!
The verdict
Cooking Academy is surprisingly fun, but if you are cack-handed with a mouse, some of the tasks will be too difficult to achieve the high grades you need to pass the end of semester exams.
