Cooking Academy 3: Recipe for Success is sure to excite fans of the Cooking Academy series. This time, you’re out to write your very own cookbook with a little help from your old cooking school professors. While the game is very much like the others in the series, this one lacked a bit of variety in the cooking tasks and left us wanting to do so much more than slice and stir.
Cooking Academy 3: Recipe for Success is sure to excite fans of the Cooking Academy series. This time, you’re out to write your very own cookbook with a little help from your old cooking school professors. While the game is very much like the others in the series, this one lacked a bit of variety in the cooking tasks and left us wanting to do so much more than slice and stir.
I am by no means a domestic goddess type. I try my best, but sometimes that great new recipe I wanted to try just doesn’t come out looking or tasting like it should, and the next thing I know, I’m ordering pizza so I have something to feed my family. I am a big fan of cooking shows though, and I also enjoy a good cooking game and often wish that real cooking could be this easy.
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I’ve played the Cooking Academy games before, and I have Cooking Mama on the Wii when Max lets me have a little playtime. I always get great enjoyment out of them and they usually put me in the mood to cook something adventurous after a few rounds of virtual chopping. Peanut brittle? That doesn’t look very hard. All I need to do is mash and stir? No problem. Maybe I should try making my own marshmallows? This doesn’t look that difficult!
Of course, I’m wrong. But it’s fun to dream. What takes me 30 seconds on the screen will compute to about 2 hours of me mashing peanuts with a mallet, and it will still turn out looking less than perfect in the end. So, maybe I should stick to gaming and keep my recipes simple and edible. I think my family would appreciate that.
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Cooking Academy 3 is very much like the previous games. You go through each professor, and they assign you a list of recipes you have to cook. Each recipe has several steps to it lasting around 30 to 60 seconds. The first professor you encounter is the one whose specialty is sugar. Yum! Here’s where you get to create tasty desserts like fudge, marzipan, and sugar on snow, whatever that is… Take a look at my cute marzipan turtles! I wish it was this easy to make something like this. Max would go crazy… he loves turtles!
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Once you achieve at least 2 stars on each recipe, you can then take your cooking exams where they test your abilities to apply what you’ve learned. The tasks they give you are pretty simple. I only had to repeat a test once or twice in order to get a five star rating. But… and here’s the but… it got very repetitive after awhile. There just wasn’t much variety in the things you were asked to do. You spread the fudge and the peanut brittle the same way. You crushed the same almonds and peanuts. I was just looking for more. The really exciting part of these games for me is the “what are they going to ask me to do next?”
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It’s fun to read about the history of the recipe, at least for me, and I like seeing what I’m “cooking” but the core concept of the game involves all the different steps of each recipe. Chop here, boil there, stir here. It can’t all be the same steps, or it starts to get a bit boring.
Overall, Cooking Academy 3: Recipe for Success was a fun cooking game to play, but the repetitiveness of the tasks made it fall short of being a great cooking game. It still made me want to go running to the kitchen to make some sugar cookies though. But from the tube… Shhhhhh don’t tell on me.
