Reviewed by Brandy Shaul
I’m a bit ashamed to admit just how many hours I spent with 2008’s Cake Mania 2 on the DS. What started with the first Cake Mania on the PC (an addictive journey to save Jill’s grandparents’ bakery from the evil “Mega-Mart”) transformed into a branching storyline that saw Jill travel all across the globe helping friends both old and new in uniquely themed bakeries with even more eccentric customers.
Cake Mania: In the Mix! is essentially a port of Cake Mania 2 for the Wii, with a few entertaining extras thrown in during its transition. Retained from Cake Mania 2 is the non-linear storyline that plays like a “choose your own adventure” novel that many probably remember from their childhoods.
Before beginning the first level, players are immediately faced with a choice of career paths, with one being to help long time friend Risha open up a chic boutique in the big city, and the other being to help ex-boyfriend Jack out of his economic rut by opening a cake shop in his underwater amusement park.
More choices will present themselves as you progress through the game, with each choice setting you into a year long (that is, 12 level long) trek through each story. In the end, you’re left with six different endings to discover, based on the choices you make, which adds an incredible amount of replayability here. Each choice comes with its own uniquely themed bakery and customers including each type from Cake Mania 2 (doctors, police officers, school kids, aliens, and so on), along with some In the Mix! exclusives in the form of horse costume mascots, among others.
Each level takes place over a month of game time, and has a monetary goal that must be met in order to continue. This is the Baker’s Goal, which will increase as cakes become more complex, and your own speed of preparation increases. Likewise, each level also comes equipped with a Superstar Goal, only accessible by going above and beyond the call of duty in terms of monthly profits.
However, unlike the PC and DS versions of Cake Mania, reaching the Superstar goal in In the Mix! is actually a lot easier said than done, first and foremost because of the game’s control setup.
Gameplay is achieved using only the Wii-mote, which itself controls your on-screen pointer. With a rapid press of the A button, Jill will hand out menus to waiting customers, collect money and move around the bakery. By holding in the A button and hovering over ovens, frosting and cake decoration machines, a submenu will appear allowing you to (while still holding the A button) move your pointer to one of four choices for that machine (cake shape, frosting color, and cake topper) and choose it by releasing the A button.
The B button, then, allows you to pick up and place cakes in various locations around the bakery, and finally deliver them to the appropriate customer. The B button is also used to pick up cookies, which are baked in the unlockable mini-oven and are used to restore customer patience.
While this control scheme may not seem very complex in words, its execution is something different altogether. For a game that is so reliant on speed and accuracy, the controls are anything but, and must be performed with surgical precision in order to be performed appropriately. In fact, the addition of the A button submenus is altogether frustrating, and would be unnecessary if the graphics weren’t as small as they are.
Even playing the game on a 27 inch TV (small by today’s standards, but it works fine in most cases), the cake shape icons, frosting colors, and so on are so small that clicking individual options is nigh impossible, necessitating such a submenu system, but adding undo frustration in the process, and a need to play the game while grasping the Wii-mote in both hands like a baseball bat, in order to steady any shakiness you might inherently posses. I can only imagine how difficult playing on a TV any smaller would become.
These disappointing controls can be looked past in the beginning levels, when the speed is minimal and customer patience is high. However, once you reach later levels, not only will you have undoubtedly upgraded your kitchen to include faster ovens, frosting machines, cake topping machines, and even purchased a movement upgrade for Jill, but customers become far more demanding, forcing your accuracy to be even more spot-on, in order to not click the wrong color, shape, etc., thereby literally throwing potential profits into the trash.
One particular kitchen upgrade that helps to counteract this is the display cake that is placed in the middle of the kitchen, where you may place any unfinished cake, or “mistake-of-a-cake” in order to get it out of the way without necessarily throwing it in the garbage. Being that the cake is out in the open, this creates a higher chance that one of your next customers will order that exact layout, thereby erasing your mistake, but even then, you’re not guaranteed to be that lucky.
At the end of each level, the cost of whatever cakes didn’t sell, or whatever materials you had to throw away (because of lack of room, etc.) will be deducted from your monthly profit. Luckily, unlike the DS version of the game, this cake stand can actually expand to hold more than one cake, offering a bit more assistance in the mistakes department.
Other additions to the Wii version of the game come in a co-op mode, which is a first for the franchise, which allows two players to work in the same kitchen simultaneously. The gameplay is the same as in the single-player mode, but offers new upgrades in the form of a fish tank, benches and tables, all of which help steady or raise customer patience, with the latter two even allowing more customers to be in line at once.
Another extra is the Custom Cakes menu, which allows you to take a break from the hectic single-player levels to create your own colorful cakes, by choosing from various cake shapes (with up to three tiers as options), frosting colors, and decorations, and later allows you to send such cakes to friends via Wii24Connect.
Aside from the undersized symbols on ovens, frosting machines and so on, the rest of the graphics do fare a bit better by retaining the same vibrant color scheme from every other Cake Mania game, while adding in a true 3D appearance to the characters. Likewise, the sound department stays extremely loyal to the franchise, by including many of the same sound effects and songs from other releases in the series.
Neither the graphics nor the sound department consist of anything extremely noteworthy, but it’s the addictive gameplay within the title that keeps gamers coming back for more, so the look of the game can be a bit forgiven. Likewise, even for the game’s diminutive appearance, the controls do become easier to handle with time: as clich?? as it sounds, practice does make perfect.
In the end Cake Mania: In the Mix! may be a bit of a step backwards for the franchise, but for those hardcore fans of the genre, there is enough familiarity here (as well as the same sense of addictive gameplay) to be worth the game’s semi-budget price of $29.99.
Special thanks to Audra McIver and Majesco for providing a copy of this title.