If Food Network: Cook or Be Cooked does one thing right, it's the graphics. The food is realistic and looks quite delicious. Even the cooking processes are animated fairly well. Mixing up the dry and wet ingredients for meatballs produces a gradually homogenous mixture, prepping garlic even includes the part where you crush it with the flat of a knife, and washing veggies includes both the rinsing and the scrubbing. The kitchen is stylish and looks like the kind of place any budding chef would want in their home. Your hands are never shown, and perhaps that's a good thing. I'm amazed that food is rendered so well, so it's probably best to quit while you're ahead with this sort of thing.

The music is very much in the Food Network style. It's the kind of generic, but catchy type of music that you would never compliment outside of a grocery store or an elevator. Still, it sets an upbeat and positive mood. There are also two hosts, who I believe are actually voiced by their real life counterparts. Mory Thomas and Susie Folgelson, both pretty big people on the Food Network, talk to you about each dish's origins, critique you about your performance, and ultimately express how much they like or dislike the outcome. Their likenesses are caricature-like 3D models. Susie's model, with her goggle-like eyes, is a little scary at first, but the pair is pretty cute otherwise.

Food Network: Cook or Be Cooked gives you a rather simple set of recipes and asks you to virtually cook them for your judges' (Mory and Susie) delight. The first recipe couldn't be simpler: bacon and eggs. It serves to introduce you to the game mechanics and teach you everything you need to know before you move on to more complex recipes. The recipes gradually get more complex, and you'll be making everything from seared tuna to baked lasagna. On that note, the unifying theme of the dishes in the game seems to be pretty simple, Americanized food. That doesn't stop them from being mouth-watering.

You receive points for almost everything you do, from peeling onions to opening cans. One thing that distinguishes this game from other cooking games is the fact that you have to time your cooking so that all the food in a dish arrives in front of the judges piping hot. This is the final area in a dish that you can receive points for, and often means the difference between a gold or a silver medal. Each main component of a dish has a timer that is displayed at the top left corner of the screen, which makes finishing a hot meal easier, but not completely foolproof.

Another thing that sets this cooking game apart from the rest is the fact that it actually makes you wait while things cook. Well, it actually doesn't force you to wait for water to boil and tuna to cook. You can fast forward cooking time with the press of a button. But if you really wanted to, you could wait for all of that to happen. This is a small feature of the game, but it really does make it feel like an authentic cooking experience. Since you have to wait for some items to cook, you can multi-task and take care of other things like prep work while you wait.

While you cook, Mory and Susie sometimes chime in with little facts or real-life cooking tips about the dish you're working on. For example, they may let you know that coriander is actually the seeds from the cilantro plant or that tuna does not need to rest before being cut. What they do most of the time, however, is tell you how well you did your last task like chopping garlic or washing potatoes. It's a little annoying, especially when you don't do anything that would actually affect a recipe's outcome in the real world. Chop an onion too slowly, and they'll groan about how they hope this will turn out alright. It can get pretty aggravating, especially when they criticize everything down to the way you punch in the time on a microwave. I could never figure out how to impress them with my microwave skills. It's very insulting, considering what a pro I am in real life.

Multiplayer modes in this game mirror the single player challenges. One mode has you compete side-by-side in a split-screen view. Each competitor works on the same recipe at the same time. Another mode, Hot Potato, has the two players pass the controls back and forth. This mode seems particularly unfair, as each player can be "stuck" with a low-scoring or high-scoring task, depending on where you are in the recipe when you swap. Of course, hardcore players of this game could memorize recipes and strategically stick the other player with the lower scoring tasks. If you know someone who takes cooking simulation to this kind of level, well, good luck, and... that sounds like a great time. Most, however, will find more fun with the split-screen mode that's a little more fair to the more casual player.

Food Network: Cook or Be Cooked suffers from the problem of not being completely playable on your first try, unless you're lucky. There are some things that you won't learn about a recipe until you've played through it at least once. For example, a recipe may call for baked potatoes that say they take 20 minutes to complete. But if you time everything else in the recipe to finish cooking when the potatoes finish, you'll discover that the potatoes actually finish a couple of minutes early, and you're left with potatoes sitting out and cooling off, therefore lowering your score.

Of course, scores only matter if you care about obtaining gold or silver medals for your performance. Other than that, this game is not particularly difficult to finish. It's especially easy when you leave the on-screen gesture prompts on. It may take a few tries to get through the more complex recipes just because you need to be aware of how everything finishes, but other than that things are pretty easy. What's more, the game will only allow you to be so bad before it shuts down on you. Try to burn your bacon and eggs, and the game will simply end on you. Perhaps some artist was just so proud of their beautiful food that they couldn't bear the thought of creating imagery for an inedible meal.

Most of the controls make the experience feel authentic. You tip the Wii-mote to pour out liquids, you shake it to add seasoning, and you chop to chop items with a knife. Some actions feel a little arbitrary. For example, some items that require assembly, like hamburgers, will call for a little rhythm mini-game where you shake the Wii-mote or the Nunchuk based on scrolling on-screen cues. It's a little out of place in a game that otherwise feels pretty authentic.

Of course, this game suffers from the classic Wii game pitfall. You thought you made a motion correctly, and the game says no. Sometimes it's just a matter of timing. For example, when you're chopping something like an onion, there is a delay from the time you watch the onion being placed on the cutting board until the time you are allowed to start chopping. If you patiently wait for the animation to end, however, you will probably miss out on the full points for the first chop. You'll be told that you're "too slow." Try to swing the Wii-mote repetitively before your cue, and you still may miss the first chop because of your timing.

Overall, the controls are good, and the little annoyances don't kill it. Cook or Be Cooked provides a fun cooking experience that just might provide you with a few real life cooking tips as well. What does kill this game is the very short length and the lack of things to do once you've unlocked all the recipes. Actually, the real-life recipes are provided for everything that you can make in the game, so you could go out and try to cook some of this stuff. On a side note, I could not stop thinking about this comedy skit by Idiots of Ants while I was playing this game, and it really cracked me up. Anyway, cooking fans will probably enjoy this offering, however brief it may be.