Published: Monday, 23rd February, 2009 10:00am

Cooking Mama 2: World Kitchen

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Nintendo Wii

Forget Gordon Ramsey or Jamie Oliver. In the gaming culinary world there is one woman who overshadows them all. And it's not even Delia Smith. The titular Mama of the Cooking Mama series is the queen of the kitchen - and with this release she's going global.

The game will be familiar to anyone who's played any of the other Cooking Mama titles, although frankly it's easily picked up by newcomers - which is just as well as it doesn't actually come with a tutorial mode. You 'cook' recipes by completing a series of minigames representing the various stages of food preparation, from peeling and chopping veggies to kneading dough and the like.

In a slight change from the usual recipe, you're not playing Mama herself, and instead are her apprentice in the culinary arts. She's still on hand to help you out though, and will even leap into action to help you if you make a potentially disasterous cooking faux pas with an extra frenetic minigame to help you snatch victory from the jaws of (curdled) defeat or - if you're too quick and knock it off the counter - the jaws of Max the dog who is lurking about to catch any tidbits.

As ever as you move through the main game mode you unlock new recipes and friends, perfecting your cooking skills to earn medals. The recipes vary from cafe fare of burgers and sarnies through to high concept fine dining with, as ever, the depictions of the food so stunning that you really don't want to be playing this on an empty stomach.

There is a multiplayer mode - although it's cooperative rather than head to head which is a bit disappointing even before you factor in there's so few recipes to play you can run through the entire thing in well under an hour. Meanwhile, Friend mode, where basically you play any unlocked recipe to try and impress a friend - basically just a slightly more difficult version of the standard mode without Mama there to step in and help.

All the ingredients (sorry!) are there for this to be a great game - the graphics are cute and engaging, the music cheery and inoffensive, and the mini games are varied enough that not only do they hold the attention but there's minimal risk of RSI after a couple of hours' play. But somehow World Kitchen just doesn't feel like it lives up to the sum of its parts. There's little new here if you've got the first game, and while it's fun unless you're a real fan of the franchise this feels very samey indeed. While every game needs a good dog, adding Max to the mix isn't enough to make it feel anything other than a reheated version of the first game.

World Kitchen feels like a ready meal of a Wii game. It'll satisfy you for a bit, but after not very long you'll be craving something more substantial.

Three (Michelin) stars out of five.

* Cooking Mama 2: World Kitchen is out now on the Nintendo Wii