Now here’s something that’s a bit of a departure from the usual fare: it’s an honest-to-gosh cooking casual game, kind of like Cooking Mama on the Nintendo Wii – except that you don’t usually get a lot of cooking games in the casual game arena that aren’t just task-juggling service games like Burger Island. This game however, puts you firmly in a kitchen with the full gamut of food-preparation tasks from appetizers, through the three main meals of the day, all the way to desert.

I was surprised to see that each stage gives you a full menu of items to pick from, so that you can go through all the dishes for that stage in the order you want. The first I picked was gyoza, which I thought was a nice touch – there are dishes from cooking traditions all over the world, even if it sticks to the more famous items from each one. The instructions are usually easy to follow, as the game uses mouse clicks and gestures following arrows on the screen to handle most cooking tasks. You click-and-drag the mouse over vegetables to chop them up, drag food items across a grater to grate them, drag over dough to fold it, and you click-and-drop items into the hot oil to deep-fry them. There are a few different types of tasks, like mini-games where you guess which ingredient needs to be added by looking at an obscured image, or watching for a shadow to see which item to mash in turn, but generally all the mini-games are quite easy to figure out. Soon I was happily folding up gyoza dumplings just like my Dad taught me as a kid!

That’s how the game handles all the food preparation tasks, from beating eggs to timing your clicks for oven cooking, to clicking and dragging on a pot to pour just the right amount of batter into each muffin pan. After the first dozen recipes, you’ll notice that although the types of dishes really go all over the menu in variety, and the ingredients and techniques seem quite authentic, the basic food preparation tasks can start to feel the same after a while.

You’ll get graded on each dish as you complete it, and after you have worked on all the recipes in each stage you’ll take an exam where you are presented with a few tasks taken from all the recipes you’ve seen, with a limited time to complete as many repetitions of that task as you can. I wouldn’t say that the game really gets repetitive, except in this case.

The visuals are simple but informative – you might have some difficulty telling a spoonful of baking soda apart from a spoonful of sugar, but otherwise it’s usually pretty clear what you’re looking at. The music is simple and cheerful, although the cooking sounds could have been more mouth-watering. Despite the fanciful variety of dishes on display, it didn’t get me as hungry as, say, Burger Island did.

All in all, it’s a good effort from Fugazo, but I hope it’s just the start of a delicious trend. We need more, and maybe even better cooking games in the casual games world. Cooking Academy has set a standard to beat. I’d grade this dish a B – it’s filling and tasty, but not quite gourmet fare.

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