 Review By: Matt Flanagan |
Developer: | FromSoftware |
| Publisher: | Agetec | |
| Genre: | Platformer | |
| ESRB: | Everyone | |
| # Of Players: | 1-4 | |
| Online Play: | Yes | |
| Accessories: | Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection | |
| Buy Now: |   |
Cookie & Cream is a port of an excellent but obscure PS2 game released about five years ago. The idea was that in addition to simple platforming, the player would be asked to solve the occasional minigame to create a means to advance in the level, and this has carried over to the DS by splitting up the minigames and main gameplay between the two screens.
The backstory involves something suitably bizarre about the moon being stolen and two rabbits having to find and retrieve it. The player guides Cookie through a series of 40 platforming levels, and every once in a while there's an obstacle with a switch near it that triggers a WarioWare-ish minigame on the bottom screen that Cream has to solve in order to allow Cookie to continue. There’s a time limit to each level, which also serves as your health meter. Getting hurt takes time away from the total, but finding the occasional clock lying around will gives the player some extra time.
Cookie & Cream is graphically decent, the colors are bright and cutesy, but get repetitive. You’ll see the same scenery and obstacles repeated over and over again as you progress, and as a result the scenery does lose its charm a bit. Graphically the game appears designed to attract a younger audience, but it’s definitely difficult enough for an older person to play as well. As the game progresses there are tricky jumps and puzzles that are a bit frustrating to figure out, and so there’s definitely some challenge there, but after beating a minigame once it’s pretty easy to beat it again as long as you remember how it’s done. Each of C&C's 8 worlds has a boss to deal with at the end, and this is where it gets pretty hectic as the player controls both Cookie and Cream simultaneously, resulting in what seems like too much for one person to handle at a time.
One of the best parts about Cookie & Cream is its excellent co-op mode that includes Wi-Fi play for up to four people, which unfortunately suffers from the game’s obscurity in that nobody really plays at all ever. I’ve tried several times to play with random people online, succeeding only once in finding somebody who quit before the game started. Fortunately, there's single-cart and multi-cart local multiplayer too, so it's worth it to force your friends to buy copies of the game.
It takes a while to get through the entire single-player mode, both because of the satisfying number of stages and the number of times you'll have to repeat each one since solving puzzles often requires simple trial-and-error. This game is not for the impatient, but anyone willing to stick with it long enough to figure out how to beat everything will find this a rewarding experience.
Bottom Line:
The only real problem with this game is that it doesn’t have a whole lot of replay value and the minigames get pretty easy to pass when you learn how they all work, so there won’t be much of a challenege the second time around. Still, it stands out as a unique game and something that’s worth your money.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
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| 7.1 |
Posted: 2007-12-14 21:07:33 PST