Hands on with Cooking Star on iPhone

Cooking Mama clunked like a frozen fillet on a dinner plate when it was served up on iPhone earlier this month, which leaves Cooking Star to set the kitchen on fire. Gastronomic gaming becomes palatable in this combination mini-game compilation and recipe book.

While it doesn't promise many innovations over previous titles in the genre, it appears to be a decent serving of snack-sized gameplay.

As Penny, a student at the Cooking Star Academy, you're moulded by the school's headmaster Desmond into the next big thing on the culinary scene. Becoming the next cooking star means drilling you with techniques and styles to make the best, most delicious food possible. From meatballs to tofu to kabobs and even escargot, the goal is to learn how to make each dish via preparation mini-games.

Cooking mode follows Penny's rise in the world of cuisine, while Challenge mode sets you to one-up your best scores making individual dishes. There's also a Today's Special mode highlighting the day's selected recipe. As you complete lessons in Cooking mode, you gain access to new dishes in the other modes and unlock real recipes to cook actual food.

We whipped up three dishes in our hands on with Cooking Star: tofu, kabobs, and burgers. Starting with tofu, the game had us slicing sheets of soybean before placing them in a pot of boiling water.

Slicing the tofu, however, is done midair as the sheets are flung across the kitchen into the pot. Perforations on the sheets signify where to slice, a swipe of your finger in the direction doing the deed.

Next up, kabobs. As kabobs are placed on the grill, turning them is a matter of tapping a circular arrow at the bottom of the skewer and tipping the handset in that direction. For those wanting a little more flavour, you can shake the device to add seasoning.

Making burgers was surprisingly the hardest of the three meals. Here, the goal is to assemble the burgers using toppings that descend from the top of the screen. A bun and patty are controlled along the bottom with your finger, moved to collect the ingredients as they fall. Nasty toppings occasionally get thrown into the mix like apple cores that you can flick away.

Even if the mini-games don't depart from tradition, Cooking Star has an edge to it that makes its primary rival look like Cooking Grandma.

Competitive cook-offs could spice things up, as well as interactive shopping lists to accompany the real recipes unlock through the course of play. There may not be time for these additions, unfortunately, as Cooking Star turns on the heat sometime in April.