Cake Mania is an absolute phenomenon in the casual gaming scene. The goal of the game is to manage time and resources under increasingly difficult conditions.
Cake Mania places you in the role of Jill, a young woman fresh out of culinary school. When she returns home from school, she’s shocked to learn that her grandparents’ bakery has gone out of business, so Jill sets out to reopen her grandparents’ beloved bakery.
You work in a bakery and it’s your job to take customers’ orders, bake cakes, decorate them, and then serve them. The game is played entirely with the stylus, and you move and perform actions by tapping a location or item on the touch screen. When customers walk in the door, you walk over to them and tap the menu icon. After a few seconds, the cake they want to order appears onscreen, and then you walk over to the oven and press the button that corresponds to what type of cake they want. When the cake is ready, you carry it to the bottom of the screen and ice it. If they want a decoration, you pick up the cake and press a button to decorate it. When it’s all finished, you take the cake to the customer, collect their payment, and do it all over again for the next customer.
This sounds easy, but it’s not really so. You almost always have more than one customer onscreen, so you’re constantly multitasking, which is often difficult because the icons onscreen are tiny and it’s easy to tap the wrong ones. Since each step in baking a cake takes a few seconds, one mistake often means the difference between meeting the quota for the day and having to do the entire level over. Certain customers, like Cupid and the Easter Bunny, are less patient than normal customers, so you must make sure you tend to their needs before their patience meter runs out. You can hand out cupcakes to refill the meter a bit, but the time it takes to go get a cupcake negates any positive effect the cupcake has. You can upgrade your kitchen in a number of ways to help serve your customers better. You can purchase a display case in which you can place a premade cake with a 20 percent chance of selling, but you never have time to make extra cakes. Faster ovens, better microwaves, and faster frosters will in theory help you get ahead, but by the time you’re able to afford these items, the customers are less patient and more particular about their cakes.
Perhaps the most important thing you can buy, though, is a platter. You can place a cake is any stage of creation on the platter so you can attend to other business. Jill only has two hands, so if you still have some cakes over at the frosting station, but you see that an oven has just opened up, you can temporarily store a work-in-progress. If you grab a freshly baked cake but don’t have a platter or any room at your frosting stations, you have to dump the cake. Dumping the cake for any reason – mistaken frosting or accidental baking – costs you money. And that cuts into your monthly take. Play Cake Mania and enjoy your free time.
Pros:
- Fast-paced Gameplay
- Many Upgrades to Work For
Cons:
- No Difficulty Levels
- Quickly Beat
Features
- Serve custom made-to-order cakes for customers.
- 4 Different locations to bake at.
- Customers have different levels of patience and preferences for type of cake, topper, and TV channel.
- 45 levels to complete.
- Customize kitchen by upgrading stoves, frosting stations, microwave, and toppers.