Pocket Chef ($4.99, link) is Gameloft’s riff on Nintendo’s rather popular Cooking Mama games. And much like Cooking Mama, Pocket Chef has you playing a series of cooking minigames in order to complete an entire recipe in the best time, with the best results possible.

Pocket Chef is based around a series of recipes, grouped into kitchens of five recipes each. You start with “American”—cheeseburgers, pizzas, french toast, etc; and after completing all five recipes a new set of five are unlocked—as well as a new kitchen. The recipes themselves are broken down into minigames, like chopping vegetables, rolling dough, spreading sauce, grilling burgers and the like. While the ingredients may change from recipe to recipe, the fundamental of the minigames do not. There are 19 of them, and once you get a handle on how they work, you shouldn’t have much trouble.



As you play each minigame, you’re scored “Great”, “Good”, or “Bad” depending on how well you follow instructions. The better (and sometimes quicker) you complete the game, the higher your score and the better the final dish comes out. One point where Pocket Chef improves on the Cooking Mama games is that the instructions actually make sense.

The graphics are simple but good. They’re uncluttered and easy to see, with some nice detailing on the food. They’re not jam packed with explosions and crazy textures, but they look nice for what they are. Likewise, the sound is pleasant, and you can pipe in your own tunes over iPod.

While the game isn’t anything exceptional, there are plenty of nice touches that speak of Gameloft’s professionalism. There’s a good tutorial system, plenty of options, and, best of all, an actual cookbook. That’s right, all the recipes included in the game come with real recipes if you want to give them a try. It’s hardly earthshattering, but it’s nice. I’m a fan.

The one part of the game that gave me some slight issues were the control. Some of the tasks, like chopping vegetables, gave significant bonuses to fine-grained swiping on the iPhone, which I felt just wasn’t physically possible. It required a degree of control my fingers just didn’t have. Likewise, the collision detection on things like spreading sauces felt a bit off—though no more than Cooking Mama.

Conclusion

Like many of Gameloft’s games, Pocket Chef ($4.99, iTunes link) takes someone else’s franchise and brings it to the iPhone, but with a certain degree of professionalism that makes up for the lack of originality. So while it may smack of being a Cooking Mama rip off, it’s actually a decent game, with good graphics, and some nice additional touches. If you’ve played Cooking Mama, you’ll probably like it; and if you haven’t, you might like it anyway. For fans of silly little minigames, it’s great fun, and you might just learn a cooking trick or two along the way. However, as pleasant as we found Pocket Chef, it didn’t do anything to greatly impress us, or to push it beyond a fairly average score. It’s pleasant, but doesn’t stand out. We found it average, and give it a 6.7/10