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| Cake Mania 2: It's Take and Bake, and I Helped! |
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First, let me say that I am a Cake Mania Maniac from way back. I have played every iteration on the PC and loved them all, my favorite being Cake Mania 2. It seems a natural extension to bring Cake Mania 2 to the DS, so that we can have our Cake Mania on the go. So just how does it translate?
First off, the premise - Jill Evans, needing a much needed break from the sameness of the Evans Bakery that she runs with her grandparents, starts off having to decide whether to help old friend Risha in opening her fancy rooftop bakery in the city, or helping old friend Jack in his struggling underwater aquarium bakery. It doesn't really matter who you select, since you'll always have the option to play the other level later. Once you complete that "world", you'll be presented with the previous remaining option, plus a new one and so on, until you have completed all of the levels. For old fans of the PC version of Cake Mania 2, the levels seem identical, so you aren't getting anything new here. Just the ability to tote your Cake Mania love around with you. |
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You'll spend one "year" at each location, so that means twelve levels for each locale. As you make money, you can purchase kitchen upgrades to bake and frost cakes faster, plus there are also decorative cake toppers to make more money. Using the DS' stylus, you'll click on a new customer to give them a menu, then when you see their visual cake order, you'll click the right icon to bake that cake shape, frost it and decorate it correctly, click to give it to them and click to pick up the dough. Of course, there's a steady flow of customers coming in all the while.
Locations include the trendy rooftop joint, the underwater bakery, a bakery in Antarctica, one in Japan, one on the moon, and one in the future, at least if they follow the PC version to the letter. At this time, I have only completed the rooftop bakery and the underwater bakery, and have played the Antarctic and Japanese bakeries. Some of the text dialogue does look a little different, so maybe there will be some surprises in there, which would be nice. |
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All of the great Cake Mania 2 music is back and sounds quite nice in the little DS. Surprisingly enough, even the sound effects like the annoying little kid yelling "It's my turn!" are present and sound perfect. As for the look of Cake Mania 2 on the DS, everything looks terrific, just smaller. Jill Evans is rendered in pixel perfect fashion and she is just as cute scooting around her tiny bakery as she was on the PC. To compensate for the smaller screen footprint, the developers show the customer detail on the top screen. When a customer comes into the shop, you won't see much of them. Mainly their hands and what is jutting out onto your screen from the side. But on the top screen, you'll see a frontal view of them, how many hearts (of tolerance and patience) they have remaining, plus the TV which can serve as a calming agent. Since I didn't have an instruction book with this preview version, it took me a bit of fiddling to find the controls for the TV, but it's the shoulder buttons to scroll through the channels.
Here's the rub. While everything has shrunk down considerably, it all still looks great and is manageable, that is, until you get to dual-layer cakes with toppers on them. Then, the toppers can look the same (at least the red pagoda and the heart look very similar) and it becomes damn near impossible to tell what your top layer cake shape is because the topper covers almost the entire thing. Then you make the wrong cake and the customer refuses it, so you put it on your cake stand in the hopes that someone else will buy it, and two or three more cakes down the line this happens again and you have to throw one away. Needless to say, it gets really frustrating. Really, really maddening. |
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Don't get me wrong, I was loving it until I got to this point. But now, not so much. Maybe the answer is to never buy the toppers, but if past games are any indication, you will get to a point where you absolutely have to invest in the toppers to make your bakery goal amount. In addition to the Career Mode, there's also Endless Mode, which starts you off in the basic kitchen with one oven and one frosting station. Jill moves super slow and everything takes a long time. After a few levels like this, you can upgrade your kitchen, and this continues as you progress. What I did here is to simply not buy the toppers and I made it to Level 9 before failing. Of course, since its Endless Mode, once you fail, that game is over.
I did experience a noticeable number of times where I would click on a customer to give them a menu and it wouldn't "take". Keep in mind that this was in a series of moves, basically queueing up things for Jill to do and the only thing place where I consistently had my clicks not recognized was in handing out the menus. If this isn't fixed before final release, it's certainly not a killer because you just have to watch for it and then click them again if it wasn't recognized. On the flip side, one really awesome change that was made was the fact that if you accidentally click the wrong cake shape or frosting color, as long as you click the correct one before Jill makes it to the station, it will do the correct one. In past games, once you screwed up and clicked the wrong thing, you were out of luck. So that's a terrific change.
Overall, I had a great deal of fun with Cake Mania 2, at least until it got frustrating. What I may try to do when the final version comes out is to avoid buying the cake toppers and see if the game is beatable that way, because the game is a blast until you can't see what you are doing anymore. |
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-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins |
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