Game review: Cooking Dash - iPhone / iPod Touch

Digital Chocolate, Gameloft and Electronic Arts are just three prolific publishers that immediately come to mind for being hit-and-miss with their new games or ports of existing titles on Apple’s mobile devices.

There is a select breed of companies, however, which have so far specialised in only good quality games.

PlayFirst is one of these, with Chocolatier and Dream Chronicles just two titles from its stable of excellent games.

I always look forward to a new release from PlayFirst, and Cooking Dash is the latest to arrive.

Cooking Dash is a spin-off from the phenomenally successful PC game Diner Dash (which has also been ported to the iPhone and iPod).

Diner Dash has become a classic time management game. In it you control Flo, an ambitious waitress who wants to make it big in the restaurant business. She works her way up by running a series of eating establishments, taking orders, serving food, clearing dishes and most importantly collecting money – all these things requiring great multitasking skills as you race against challenging time limits.

Cooking Dash follows a similar theme – except this time Flo is in the kitchen and the action is even more manic.

Like Diner Dash before it, Cooking Dash has a pretty contrived plot.

Flo’s chef Cookie has gone off to be on a TV cooking show, leaving her in a pickle. It’s made worse by Cookie inviting all the other chefs in the town to be guests on his show. So Flo not only has to take on kitchen duties in her own diner but has to run four other restaurants too.

Luckily you work through the game one restaurant at a time rather than managing all five at once, and Flo has cleverly enlisted the help of her grandma to help in the kitchens.

The game works like this. Customers appear at your diner door and you drag them (in the nicest possible way) to their seats. After a minute they tell you what food or drink they want. You go off to make their orders and then deliver them. Once diners have eaten you take their payments and clear their dishes.

Fortunately you don’t need any actual culinary skills to succeed in this game. Everything is done via the game’s intuitive touch-and-go controls.

For instance, when someone orders steak and chips you click on the steak icon in the fridge to move Flo there. You then click on the oven to start cooking the steak. Next, click on the chips icon to get those and then the fryer to cook them. When the oven pings you collect the steak, then you go and grab the chips. When the plate is complete you click on the appropriate table to deliver the order.

As you can see, while food may be at the heart of the game, it's actually doing things in the right order that forms the basis of the gameplay.

Following these several steps to fulfil each order is not as complex as the game gets. Flo can’t just stand around waiting for food to cook. When the restaurant gets busy she may need to work on several orders at once. While fulfilling each one she also needs to be seating new customers, fetching desserts, clearing tables and taking dishes to be washed.

There are various types of customers and they don’t come into the diner in nice even groups. They arrive sporadically and then take different amounts of time to order and then eat their food.

Planning a sequence of actions to get everyone seated, served and sent on their way in a timely fashion is crucial. If you ignore customers for too long they will get angry and leave, which costs you points. Points matter because each of the 50 levels has a points target to meet before you move on to the next. Failure and you must repeat the level. Success and you move on – plus you can purchase various upgrades to increase Flo’s speed or to keep customers happier, such as music players and coffee machines.

Keeping customers happy scores extra points. You can also score bonus points by repeating one action in a chain, such as serving three customers in a row or clearing all the tables in an uninterrupted string.

Cooking Dash is described as a casual game but other than being suitable for playing in quick bursts there is nothing casual about it. Things start off quite gently with a helpful tutorial but the game then gets very intense very quickly. Progress through the levels depends on a mix of quick thinking and strategic planning. Good timing plays a big part too.

Like all PlayFirst titles, Cooking Dash is a highly polished game. Unlike too many other PC games which have basically been dumped on to the iPhone and iPod, it’s clear this version of Cooking Dash has been specially tailored for the platform.

The controls work great, the sound is nice, the text is easy to read – the overall presentation is very slick.

One little gripe is that the graphics are slightly too small. It can be hard to tell chips from fried potatoes, difficult to tell when a customer is eating or has their hand up to request the bill. This isn’t a deal-breaker and the game is still playable, I would just prefer things on the screen to be a bit larger.

Overall, Cooking Dash is a frantic and fun experience. It doesn't bring anything original to the time management table, but if you enjoyed Diner Dash and other games like it then you’ll love this one.

Verdict: 8 out of 10