Cake Mania Review

Beginners in the task-management genre of games will find Cake Mania to be an easy play, preparing them for the more involved games in the category. Easy to learn and get the hang of, Cake Mania has some good elements but also has a lot of problems.

Basic Customer Management

Playing exclusively with the mouse, like many other task-management games, you must click each customer to give them a menu, the oven to bake their cake, the frosting machine to frost it, and the decorating machine to add the final touch before you give them the cake and collect your money. You play Jill, a fresh culinary school graduate, who returns home to find that her grandparents' bakery has closed down. She vows to work hard to earn enough money to buy back their bakery, which is where you come in.

Limited Earning Potential

Like similar games, you have a monetary goal and a limited amount of time to earn it in. However, if you reach the goal before you run out of time, the level ends early. This is disappointing, because you are able to spend the money you earn each level on upgrades in between levels. With the level ending early, the game limits your earning potential and only allows you to make the amount of money it wants you to make. Ultimately this limits the game's replayability, because there are no incentives for doing well or better than the required goal, because you don't get anything special for it.

Only One Game Mode

In addition, there is only one mode of play: Story Mode. You have to follow the story and have no options for any other kind of play, which combined with the forced ending of levels makes Cake Mania very monotonous, limiting its appeal.

Repetitive Levels

Along the same lines, each level is boringly repetitive. You complete exactly the same tasks each level, over and over and over again. Other task-management games have methods of combating this fault, but this game doesn't offer any sort of relief from the monotony that is Cake Mania. As the levels progress you may have to make a two-layered cake instead of a single layer, but you just drag and drop one layer onto another and POOF! - a two-layered cake.

Unique Customers With Simple Requests

There are different customer types that are quite humorous, such as Santa and Dracula, which supposedly add to the difficulty, but in general an average task-management player can handle every request easily. This makes it a good game for beginners, because it is easy to learn and play, but not so much for player with a little bit of experience.

Failing Sucks

If for some reason you don't pass a level, the game offers no explanation for your failure as a pastry chef. Instead you have to try to figure out if someone got mad and left, or if you accidentally made the wrong cake and no one bought it, or some other reason. Failing a level uses up one of your “lives,” and you get four lives for the whole game, which indicates how easy it really is.

Graphics Seem To Be Geared Toward Younger Players

Both visually and aurally, Cake Mania is an attack on the senses. Bright colors and “cutesy” elements like strawberries and hearts adorn the screen on the between-levels screens. The graphics in-game don't match this optimism, however. The characters and equipment look like cardboard cutouts, and move jerkily rather than fluidly. Everything looks really bland during the levels, which really detracts from the experience. The buttons for cakes, frosting and decorations are all very small, very close together, and are all similar in color.

Rather than continuing with the bright colors from the loading screens, the levels themselves are all soft, pastel-like colors that all basically look the same at a quick glance. With the low level of difficulty and repetitive nature of the game, the visuals really should have been up to a much higher standard in order to offer some kind of entertainment. The music and sound effects are obnoxious and annoying, but that's peanuts compared to the monotony and graphics.

Conclusion - Try Another Game First

Ultimately, Cake Mania is a low-quality task-management game, suited for beginners or those who don't care about difficulty, visuals, or finding the best gaming experience possible. It offers some good elements such as fun customer types and being relatively intuitive for new players. Unfortunately, the drawbacks well outweigh the good qualities. The poor graphics, repetitively boring gameplay, and low level of difficulty make Cake Mania a game to avoid for avid task-management fans. There are certainly much, much better games out there.