If the success of Cake Mania was any indication of how well service games do in the casual games market, then it would be no surprise to anyone that the developers decided to go back to their little game laboratories and concoct yet another version of the immensely successful cake-making game.

The storyline for Cake Mania 2 (not that it matters) takes the player on a quest to rescue a girl friend’s failing rooftop bakery business, or an old flame’s flailing underwater theme park bakery business. Thanks for putting me in such a rut, having to choose between such impossible scenarios! Worry not though, as you’ll have plenty of opportunity to come back and help the other one out once you’re done with one location. Not only that, the game promises to unfold into 6 different endings, so there is going to be a lot of replayability; allowing you to milk your $19.90’s worth.

Gameplay wise, you go through the process of taking orders, baking the cake, frosting them and sending them on their way to the customers. In that order. Mess up, and you’ll get the customers pissed because you were taking too long to prepare their order. To make things even harder, when 2 cakes are accidentally placed in the same frosting machine, they end up getting stacked, and you’ll have to trash them and start over. The upgrades in the game are almost identical to the first; more machines to make cakes faster and to put on different frostings. However, a couple of new ones like the TV and cookie oven really help appease twitchy customers while they wait.

At first glance, I would say Sandlot Games really know their customer demographics well. There are far too many characters in Cake Mania 2 who are uniformed men to be a coincidence. I found the policeman character that frequented the rooftop bakery asking Jill to “frost his heart-shaped cake” slightly discomforting. Never mind the surgeon visiting the underwater theme park cake shop either. What on earth were they doing there? Irrelevant questions aside, the game does throw the player into the strangest locations and to make it even more quirky, tops it off with characters like the grandmas with cats and punk rock escapees from camp My Chemical Romance.

Graphically speaking, not much has changed from first installment. The graphics for Cake Mania were already top notch to begin with, and the good thing about the new one is much nicer details. One option in the game settings was to toggle high detail graphics On/Off which baffled me, but I supposed that it was there to prevent you from killing your PC playing a 2D game. Music wise, there weren’t any grating moments for me, and the soft elevator-type tunes kept things Zen while Jill whisked about frantically making cakes.

I’m glad to say that the developers didn’t attempt to deviate too far from the original game with features that would otherwise spoil the gaming experience for Cake Mania 2. If you already loved the first one, this game would already have been on your PC even before this review came out. For those of you who ARE looking, Cake Mania 2 is truly one of the most polished and balanced out there in the market.

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