I have a notoriously low quality filter when it comes to mini game style games. I can find the joy in almost any mini game collection and developer Sat Box has made a few excellent budget titles in this area. One series that recently had its third entry released is the Make It! series. It features a single mini game priced at £2.49 (although the series is often discounted) for 1-4 players to go head to head in a street food cooking contest. The series is so simple to pick up and play, it feels like a relic from the Wii Ware store – and I mean that as a compliment.
There are three entries in the series at the time of writing. Takoyaki (octopus balls), Taiyaki (fish pastries) and Ikayaki (bbq squid skewers) but each game plays out in the exact same fashion. They have the exact same menus, game options, game modes and control system too. If you enjoy one of these games, you’ll enjoy all three and if you don’t like one, you won’t get on with any of them.
Each game presents you with a griddle or grill that is split into three rows – a row that cooks fast, one that’s average cooking speed and one that cooks slowly. You then lay down rows of your food choice as per the game you are playing the cooking begins. Moving with the d-pad or analogue stick, you’ll spot when the food has cooked to the next stage and very quickly press the action button to flip, skewer, sauce, chop or fill the food up. You’ll spot when to action them as the food piece will steam or turn a new colour. When the food is fully cooked, it’ll glimmer with sparkles and you’ll need to box them for selling with the box button. Depending on how well you cooked each piece, you’ll score perfect, good or negative bad points for your overall score. Only completely cooked food scores and you’ll be up against the timer or your AI bots or local friends to see who scores the most.
The Make It! series is extremely basic with its controls and goals, so instead of placing complexity into the process, it gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with. Each game gives you at least 21 food slots that you can fill but doing so means you’ll need to speed around the grill at a rampant pace. Just a couple of wrong moves, a mistaken button press or biting off more than you can chew means things come crashing down quickly. You can’t bin any food mid process so you’ll either choose to abandon using that part of the grill to avoid getting a negative score, or you take the hit early and box the food asap so you can move on quickly. It’s one of those games where you can’t believe you’ve made mistakes on such simple actions and that’s what makes the 1-4 player battle mode enjoyable. You can do this with up to 3 AI bots or 4 local players for a 2 minute battle. There is also time trial mode for each game too where a 3 minute score attack sees your best score ranked on the steam leaderboards. I am genuinely astonished at some of the high scores – I know I’ll never get there!
Being critical, my main annoyance with this series is that there is zero switch up of the formula between the three games. They bleed into each other with the same controls and logic. There should be at least some control variation to make them stand out but instead its a visual foodie swap out and that’s about it. At a stretch I could argue that the Taiyaki game has a slightly different griddle lay out because you have to cook two halves a fish pastry and then press them together. If that’s the only iteration across three games though, it does make me think this series would have been more fun a single game combined with different control schemes for each food type.
That said, I have had fun in short bursts playing these games and propping up the bottom of the online leaderboards. There is a definite reviewer score tilt because I adore these kinds of silly mini games but if you are not sold on Wii Ware titles, you may want to knock the score down a point or two.
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