Recommended for ages 6 and up
PEGI rate Cooking Mama 4 as a 3+, meaning the content included therein is suitable for everybody much like a 'U' rated film. Some boys may find the pink girly-ness a bit questionable though.
Cooking Mama 4 is a game in which you join the titular Mama character in preparing various dishes through a series of simple, Touch Screen controlled mini-games. You'll be chopping, frying and measuring your way through some two hundred of the things, and the better you perform, the better the score and medal you receive at the end are although there's no consequences for failing, as Mama will fix it, and you still unlock the next recipe, even if you do nothing whatsoever in the mini-games!Being aimed squarely at young girls means the mini-games in question are self-explanatory, with blue arrows indicating the necessary actions, so even those that can't read yet aren't left out. And as a lot of the mini-games use very similar actions, so once they've sussed out one chopping game, they've sussed out them all although a basic reading ability would be an advantage, as you do get a little written explanation before each mini-game, it's not a necessity.
Cooking Mama 4 isn't going to teach them practical food preparation when slicing vegetables, do you usually have some scallywag moving the bowl, or do you have a game of catch the toast pieces as they fly out the toaster at incredible speeds? No. Although it may give them a vague idea of what goes into a recipe, it's not an educational game by any means but it sure is fun, as my then-four-year-old cousin proved, playing Cooking Mama 2 to death.
Cooking Mama 4 offers plenty of choices for multiplayer games and it doesn't matter whether you have multiple copies of the game or not, as it also supports Download Play, letting everyone join in in a four-player cook-off competition.
