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Thursday, September 18, 2008
Cake Mania 3
Cake Mania 3, a fun time management game from Sandlot games, builds on the successful Cake Mania franchise. In Cake Mania 3, Jill is about to get married to Jack (who you may remember from the previous game) when a time distortion ball breaks, sending her friends and family to different eras: prehistoric, ancient Egypt, the Ming dynasty in China, 17th or 18th century Paris, and perhaps the Shire.As in previous Cake Mania games, the purpose is to give a customer a menu, take the order, make the cake, ice it, garnish it (if you've unlocked that tool) and deliver it, trying maintain or improve the customer level of hearts (patience). Items to unlock include a phone, additional ovens and icing machines, a display case, a tea maker, and garnish tools. Other items include a phone to take cake orders over the phone, and shoes for swiftness. Of course, each of these can be upgraded. They are purchased with the profits from your days.
In each time scenario, there are different power ups to use. The prehistoric has a club that allows you to give any cake to the waiting customer. In Egypt, the Ra power-up extends the day. In China, the Tao of Cake (which is a phrase I may borrow for my own purposes) extends the patience (it doesn't give more, but holds the customers at their current heart level). In the Shire/Fairyland, the crystal ball will tell you what the next customer without a menu will order.
There is an additional powerup that is achieved either through making a specific cake or through strings of 3-series (3 menus, 3 coin collections, etc). This sugar rush makes all the tools (ovens, tea machine, icers, garnishers) produce instantly instead of having a timer. This is a fun element to manage!
In addition to gameplay, there is a sandbox area where you can create wedding cakes, save and send them as e-cards. This does not need to be unlocked, but can be accessed from the first play. A cartoon function will also be unlocked down the road. There are also mini-games on the map, where you have to make and package a certain number of cakes off a conveyor belt. You can earn extra money this way, as well as bonus power-ups.
What they did well: Cutscenes added voice-overs, a nice change of pace for a casual game! The text was witty and poked good fun (for example, Jill wonders why cavemen and dinosaurs are together). I played the first release of Cake Mania 2 and encountered several major showstopper bugs. This version seems much more solid. I found the controls worked better than in the previous games. The costumes for Jill were hilarious. Each customer "pays" with appropriate "coin" (i.e. chimps pay with bones, dinos with stones, etc.) That attention to detail is nice. The sandbox mode, the mini-games, and the save functions are all superb additions.
What could have been better: An explanation of why they had a time distortion ball in the first place. The Ra gift from Egypt didn't seem to add much gameplay value.
Cake Mania 3 is a big improvement over Cake Mania 2 and is a very fun time management game.
Recommended for: fans of the Cake Mania series, time management game fans, and those with a sense of humor
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1 comment:
omg is anyone else stuck on lvl 6 in fairyland? HELP!
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