Cooking Mama

How did you learn to cook? Warm maternal influences, passed down secret family recipes, or a surrogate culinary sage, a Delia, Jamie or Nigella? Perhaps you've yet to make the leap and still live on Pot Noodles and Pringles?

Well now you have another option; put your food education in the hands of Cooking Mama.

Who is this robust matriarch and what are her credentials? Well, for a start she looks a little young, and that headscarf's no replacement for experience. Still behind that pretty complexion and those twinkly eyes lies a steely determination to whip you into shape, through a regime of precise orders, idle flattery, and hellish ire.

The game starts off offering you 15 recipes – examples include miso soup, fried chicken, and Salisbury steak – and by successfully cooking said dishes you access further recipes until you have a whopping 76 in your repertoire. Each is broken down into a series of tasks, with Mama standing over you on the topscreen and offering instruction on each stage.

It's also possible to practice the tasks before attempting them for real, and you can combine dishes to create for a rounded meal of your choice, too.

So after a few adventures with the DS stylus, you should have some hefty cooking expertise, right? Well not exactly. The methods employed in Cooking Mama mean novice chefs may end up with a patchy selection of transferable skills.

Recipe-wise, the fact you concentrate on one task at a time means it's easy to lose sight of the whole picture and forget your ingredients. Many useful and easily-included instructions have been neglected – for example, you have to guess the ratio of rice to water. And we're pretty sure blowing on a boiling pot of stew (the game's sole concession to the DS' inbuilt microphone) doesn't work in real life either.

But perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the entire game is Cooking Mama herself. Mama doesn't care about food as much as she cares about discipline. There are no happy accidents in this kitchen. Her praise may be steady when you've done well, but when you fail a task she proffers the seemingly reassuring 'Don't worry, Mama will fix it' – only with FLAMES ARE SHOOTING OUT OF HER EYES! Something of the Gordon Ramsey m'thinks.

There are also some distinctly iffy health and safety issues around Mama's methods. Take, for example the jovial instruction, 'Peel boiled potatoes quickly before you burn yourself!'

Eh? Why would there be any danger? Well Mama's way involves placing a piping hot potato from the baking tray onto the palm of your onscreen hand and using the stylus to peel four corners of the potato skin back. While you are doing this you can see your hand underneath turning red. If you don't peel it in time your skin starts burning, smoke puffs out, you drop the potato and start waving frantically. What's Mama thinking? Could the glint in her eye be the result of the cooking alcohol?

Aside from these terrors, the majority of the game sinks as quickly as a souffle when you open the oven door too soon.

There are a few compensations. The beat-matching tasks of adding ingredients and turning the stove up in time to the music could prove useful for those who like to dance around in the kitchen. And the presentation is resolutely kitsch, with finished meals sitting steaming on a gingham tablecloth framed by blue curtains.

At the end of certain dishes you even get to arrange the ingredients on the plate; with steak you get a little happy face flag to pop on top. Meanwhile, the music is very saloon bar piano, which adds a bizarre Wild West feel to proceedings.

But the gameplay itself is often overly difficult or wholly rewarding. There's little joy in setting an oven timer, or adding ingredients as they materialise from Crimewatch-style pixelated images. The only satisfaction comes courtesy of tasks involving knives. Chopping vegetables by rapidly tapping the stylus has some merits, but it says something about a game, even a cooking sim, when the highlights are peeling shrimps and grating ginger.