Cooking Academy 3: More Casual Fun with Delicious Food – Weekly Indie Spotlight
Cooking Academy 3: Recipe for Success is labelled as the third game in the Cooking Academy series, but it’s actually the fourth game in the series. A spin-off game, Kitchen Brigade, was released between the second and third games, but we’ll get to that game in a future Indie Spotlight. For now, let’s take a look at Cooking Academy 3.
Cooking Academy 3 is Comfort Food for Gamers
Developed by Fugazo Inc, Cooking Academy 3 continues the loose storyline from the previous games. Now you’re a fully trained chef with your own restaurant, but you want to write your own cookbook, so you once again go back to school to learn some new recipes to fill your cookbook. The story won’t win any awards for originality, but it doesn’t need to, since these games are about the cooking experience.
Like Cooking Academy and Cooking Academy 2, this game focuses on cooking all kinds of recipes. You mix, bake, slice, fry, and more. This time around, the recipes are grouped together by their main ingredients. There are courses dedicated to sugar, dairy products, chicken, and more. Amusing instructors guide you through the recipes and deliver fun food facts while they’re at it.
As with the previous two games, Cooking Academy 3 has a relaxing atmosphere that invites the player into the world of cooking. The mouse-centered gameplay makes for an almost tactile experience, making you feel as if you’re really preparing some delicious food. The food also looks really tasty when you finish a recipe. You will definitely feel hungry after playing this game.
Some Gimmicky Minigames
That said, some of the cooking minigames feel more gimmicky than realistic. For example, when you’re separating egg whites from yolks, the yolks come falling from the sky, and you have to catch them by moving an eggshell back and forth. When you’re spicing something, you have to memorize the spices’ order in a Simon-style memorization minigame. While these minigames might be fun for a few minutes, they interfere with the game’s realistic feel.
Perhaps the developers were trying to do something new with these minigames, but the minigames feel like a distraction from the actual cooking. However, they aren’t distracting enough to take away from the main experience, which is, of course, cooking. As with the first two games, this game made me want to try some more cooking in real life, even though I’m terrible at it.
This game also polishes up the presentation when compared to the previous two games. For example, the menu where you pick which course to take looks like a college campus, and you click on a building to select a course. The characters also have a sharper, more stylized design to them. Although these tiny improvements don’t affect the gameplay, they do give the game a more appealing look and feel. The developers likely had more of a budget for this game than they did for the previous two games.
If You Liked the First Two Games, You’ll Like Cooking Academy 3
Cooking Academy 3 doesn’t do anything to shake up the formula established by the previous two games, but it doesn’t need to. Sometimes, more of the same with a few little tweaks is exactly what you need. You’ll still have a chill time preparing recipes with a simple, fun game. If you want an action-packed experience, look elsewhere, but if you just want to relax and enjoy some virtual food, Cooking Academy 3 and its predecessors might be exactly what you need. Check them out for some stress relief. Cooking Academy 3 can be purchased on Big Fish Games for $9.99.
