Cake Mania 2 Review by Meryl

Meryl

Jill Evans returns! Hard to believe it’s been almost a year since we’ve met Jill (no relation) in Cake Mania and helped her bakery. She comes back to help her friends who have problems with their bakeries. The game introduces a “choose your own adventure” style feature where you decide which friend of Jill’s to help along with other scenarios. Other than that, Cake Mania 2 doesn’t introduce anything truly new.

Nonetheless, it’s a delight to discover new locales and new types of customers. When starting the game, choose to help Risha, Jill’s friend from college, or Jack, an old flame. Risha has a classy rooftop bakery while Jack’s problematic place is in an underwater theme park in the ocean. Jill can also work in four other bakeries each with a different theme and layout.

The bakery’s layout changes every time Jill moves to a new locale. This adds to the challenge as you have to re-learn where everything is in the bakery. The change causes interesting mistakes and mix-ups. The ovens also change shapes. You might have a fish, star, square and circle in one locale and then another locale’s ovens contain moons, flowers, hearts, and triangles.

Jill deals with 18 different customers including punks, spoiled children, the cat lady, celebrities, high society, and secret agents. What’s odd is that some of the customers don’t belong in certain locations, but they show up. With this many customers, the game could do a better job matching the customers and locations.

This time customers may enter in pairs, so that means fulfilling two orders. Between that and taking care of customers, I make mistakes where I accidentally choose the wrong cake topper or icing color. No problem, leave the accidental cake on the display plate and redo the order.

But the annoying mistake comes when I put a cake down to pick up another only to find I stuck them together and can’t take them apart. While the challenge comes in getting the orders straight, I take issue with errors like this. However, I’m not sure having the ability to break apart two or three cakes would be wise. Would that make the game too easy? It works out because customers see the mistake cakes and buy them. Thank you, impulse buys!

You can buy upgrades after successfully completing a level, if you have enough money. This one comes with 50 upgrades and lasts the whole game. In fact, I don’t get to use them all by the time I finish. I also earn a trophy! Apparently, there are six trophies, but we don’t know what they are. Levels, by the way, last for a month. It’s a nice change and less stressful to go through the days of the month instead of racing the clock.

Jill has let success go to her head a little as we see her ego pop out when celebrities and high society show up. But other than that, she’s still adorable. Her commentaries that appear between levels are fun, sometimes humorous reads. Some games display long and useless comments or back story, but not this one — it’s the right length. You can skip them and still benefit from the game.

The “choose your own adventure” compels players to replay Cake Mania 2 as there are six possible endings and over 200 levels. The game also comes with the requisite endless mode, but I never play these because they make me insane!

For game strategies, check out Sandlot’s Tips and Tricks. If you haven’t played the original, you won’t miss anything by diving into Cake Mania 2. It comes with the usual tutorials and the story doesn’t feel like it’s missing something if you haven’t played the first one. Overall, Cake Mania 2 is a tasty game that falls short of the five-star award.

We give Cake Mania a 4/5 diamond rating

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/98SE/2000/XP
• 500 MHz Pentium 2 or faster processor
• 128 MB RAM
• DirectX 7.0 or later
• 3D Video Card with 16 MB Video RAM

System Requirements: Windows Vista

• 800 MHz Pentium 2 or faster processor
• 512 MB RAM
• Graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable