Cooking Mama 2 delivers seconds to those hungry for more of the same, but most of us were already full.

The original Cooking Mama for the DS came at a time when we finally started to see just how innovative DS titles could truly be. We saw that we could use our stylus as a scalpel in Trauma Center, we could use it as an investigative tool in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and finally we could use it as an all in one kitchen utensil not unlike what you might see on the Home Shopping Network. While Cooking Mama had its flaws, its originality and its appeal towards the casual audience made it popular enough to warrant a Wii spin-off, and a full sequel on the DS. Is the second course as appetizing as the first? Let’s find out.

If this is your first time cooking with Mama, here is what you need to know. You start off by picking one of the 80 or so dishes that Mama has in her little cookbook. Then you “cook” that dish by playing through various minigames that mimic the actual steps that you would take to really create that dish in real life. If you were making pizza for instance, you’d first mix the ingredients to create the dough, then you would knead it, do the whole thing where you spin the dough around on your finger and toss it into the air, put sauce on it, put on whatever toppings you want, then finally toss it into the oven. When you finish, you’re given a grade and a medal based on how good you did, unlock the next dish, and repeat the process until you just can’t listen to Mama’s horrific engrish cheering anymore.

The minigames are understandably simple and are closer to Wario Ware’s microgames than they are to traditional minigames like you would find in a game like Mario Party. To cut ingredients all you do is draw a line wherever the game tells you, to mix you move your stylus around in a circle (though move it too fast and you’ll spill the ingredients), to dice you tap the on screen knife really fast, and to grate you slide your stylus back and forth really fast. Of course there are a lot more minigames than just those four, but you’ll be doing a lot of the same activities in a different context. Instead of stirring you may be grinding meat, but you’re still just drawing circles really fast. Instead of dicing you might be sprinkling powder, but you’re still just tapping the screen really fast. To make the repetition worse is the fact that there are very few recipes with unique minigames. Meaning you’ll be doing a lot of the same old mixing, slicing, and dicing for the vast majority of the recipes.

I’d like to go on, but that’s really all there is to Cooking Mama franchise, and nothing much has been changed in Cooking Mama 2 other than a bunch of new recipes and new minigames that go along with those recipes. There is a new mode called “Let’s Cook” that has you cooking dishes all the way through without being interrupted by the instruction screens for every minigame, but it basically boils down to the same thing presented in a different manner. The main difference in this mode is that Mama isn’t there to fix things for you if you screw up, so if you fail one of the minigames, your dish becomes inedible and you’ll have to start over.