It’s a total crapshoot whether your motion will actually register properly onscreen, leading to a frustrating experience where your performance on a dish often takes a hit because the game didn’t pick up all your inputs. This is where even more problems are introduced, because the motion controls are frankly terrible and call to mind the cavalcade of low-effort third party games from the Wii that tacked on motion controls as a 'feature'. Playing Cooking Mama: Cookstar in handheld mode just sees you using the sticks to handle most of the motions, but if you’re playing in docked mode, you’ll be using motion controls instead via a single Joy-Con. Cooking Mama: Cookstar is not a good game, and it’s clear why some of the developers wanted more time to polish it up further.

Unfortunately, the reality is far less rosy. In an ideal world, this could make Cooking Mama: Cookstar the definitive ‘hidden gem’ release on the Switch an enjoyable party game that only a few will ever get to experience for themselves. The bottom line is that this is a game which, weirdly enough, might never see a full release beyond the odd physical copies that have already made it out into the wild. Conspiracy theories around copyright infringement and – of all things – a cryptocurrency-mining scheme were tossed around, but the reality seems to be that certain individuals involved in development pushed the release into production far ahead of schedule. What began as an innocuous and unassuming new release in a beloved series has quickly grabbed headlines after its mysterious and sudden disappearance from storefronts. It’s been rather fascinating to follow the slowly unfolding trainwreck of Cooking Mama: Cookstar over the past week or so.

Free games cooking mama 3