Tonight on a very special episode of What’s Cooking?: slicing, mixing, and baking! Forget that silly non-interactive TV viewing. Tonight, you are going to participate. So grab your —

Wait a second viewers, don’t go grabbing your bowls and spatulas. You aren’t going to interact by cooking with me, you’re going to interact by doing all of the cooking yourself. No need for any plug-in or battery-operated mixers – a three-inch stylus will suffice. Now flip open your DS, gaze at the dual-screen wonder, and get ready to drag and drop like a pro.

Into the Fryer

What’s Cooking? with Jamie Oliver is essentially another version of Cooking Mama, minus the mini-game fantasy and mainstream, anyone-can-grasp-it gameplay. As a result, you find yourself in a full 3D kitchen whose architecture is much better than the touch-screen mechanics you’re about to experience. Let me take you through an average recipe…

Start by glancing at the ingredients list. If this is a tutorial stage, the game will direct your every step. If not, hop on over to the ingredients section (tap the icon on top left corner of the screen) and drag the listed ingredients to various portions of the game. This drag-and-drop setup is quick and fairly intuitive. If you drag an ingredient to the wrong location (the cutting board instead of the mixing area, for example), you can simply drag it over to the proper area.

All areas of the kitchen are accessible via the icon list on the top of the screen, which includes the aforementioned ingredients, cutting board and mixing areas, as well the fridge, stove, oven and final resting place (where finished recipes are pieced together before the stage ends).

This setup is perfectly acceptable, giving the game a very nice introduction. But when it comes to recipe preparation, it becomes more of a chore than a mini-game, and is nowhere near what it feels like to actually put a meal together.

All things likely, the recipe will require that you boil, fry or bake something. Boiling consists of filling a pan with water, setting it on the stove, and turning on the burner. Add the listed ingredient and you’re done. You may have to kill a few minutes with the time-advance feature, or sit there bored while it boils (purely optional and not recommended – you’re better off advancing time), but the outcome is the same.

Frying isn’t much different. You may have to tap and drag the pan to ensure its contents don’t burn or whatever, but the act isn’t too thrilling. Baking is as easy as popping something into the oven. Advance the clock several minutes (the recipe should tell you how long the item needs to bake) and you’re done.

Many recipes call for a mixture of something, such as eggs and flour. Well, that means you’ll have to pick up an egg or two (or more, depending on the recipe) with the stylus, crack them on the side of the bowl and drop them in. Flour is poured into the bowl by lightly scratching the bottom screen.

To mix the ingredients together, grab a wooden spoon or an electric mixer and scratch the screen in a circular motion. Bam! – your mixture is complete.

The game continues on from there. You have access to an interactive cookbook, may piece together dozens of different recipes, or experiment on your own. Of course, without being able to taste the virtual items, experimentation within a game doesn’t mean much. It could, however, make you very hungry.

Undercooked

What’s Cooking? had a great opportunity to become the new leader in cooking video games. Unfortunately, the last eight paragraphs summed up the entire “gaming” experience that this title offers. You get a star rating at the end of each recipe, but that won’t mean anything to you. The menus are intuitive but they alone do not create entertainment. Though we may have been deceived by Cooking Mama, whose touch screen (DS) and motion-based (Wii) gameplay made us believe that slicing and dicing can be fun, it is not entertaining in Jamie Oliver’s take on the genre.

After the first few recipes, you quickly realize that this is a game of rolling through monotonous motions. Long before the game is finished, you will become very bored and have no desire to return.

Gameplay: 3.0
Not much of a game at all. Gamers will be turned off by the lack of entertainment, while the average food lover would be better off using a standard cookbook.

Graphics: 5.0
The kitchen looks great but the food is hideous. It looks nothing like the picture of the recipe you're trying to make.

Sound: 6.0
The music isn't necessarily bad, but it sounds like it came from the NES. Jamie Oliver's brief voice-overs may delight his most dedicated fans, but they don't add anything to the experience.

Difficulty: Easy
Without any modes or challenges that resemble gameplay, What's Cooking? is, well (you know I have to say it), a cakewalk.

Concept: 6.0
The seamless kitchen layout is a solid improvement over other cooking games, but the lack of substantial gameplay fails to produce a memorable experience.

Multiplayer: 2.0
Local multi-card play is included for sharing recipes. But if I wanted to bake something and a friend said, "I'll come over, we'll turn on our DSes and I'll upload my recipe to your game," I'd quickly respond, "That's crazy. Just type it up and e-mail it to me."

Overall: 3.0
What's Cooking? could have been the next Cooking Mama. But instead of going for video-game supremacy, it took a different route and became an interactive cookbook. If that's what people want from this game, it might just work. But I suspect that most DS owners, even those who don't play more than Brain Age and Nintendogs, come to the system for an actual gaming experience. If you want a digital cookbook, I'm sure there's a Web site that will suffice.