Cake Mania made its entrance on the market in 2006 when Sandlot Games brought the title to PC and mobiles. Now, after two years, Cake Mania is back, with a Baker's Challenge for the handheld owners but will the cake have the cherry on top or not?

The main idea of the game is to serve the bakery customers before the time runs out. There can be four customers at the same time in the bakery, and you must use all your resources to be quick, deliver, and get your tip. When customers get in the bakery, you must greet them with a cake menu, and after deciding what type of cake they want, head over the oven and bake the shape. You must then frost the shape and maybe add some decorations. When all's done, you wrap up the cake and hand it to the buyer, who gives you the money and like I said earlier, a little something extra to upgrade your bakery.

The bakery can be upgrade with three ovens, three frosting machines, a TV set, a cupcake microwave, two decoration tables and a cake stand. The ovens can be upgraded two times and the final upgrade, the state-of-the-art Bake-King 5000 will turn out delicious desserts in an amazing two seconds. The Frost-King 2000 is the leanest, meanest froster on the market. Produces perfectly iced cakes in the blink of an eye. Clients love decorations on their cakes so there are 8 types of decorations available: a candle, roses, strawberries, wedding couple, granny, slyder, snail and ships. Depending on the decoration, you can earn an extra 10 to 25 bucks.

Come on it. Have a cookie :)

There are several types of customers, some more impatient than others. For example, grannies, students or delivery men will wait longer for their order than Cupid, food critics or boys. The wait time is displayed by hearts over the customer, and when it goes down to only one heart, you can give them cupcakes or turn on the TV and switch to a specific channel. Choice of TV program can be catered to your expected clientele. Kids prefer cartoons, males the news and females the food network. Probably the most important upgrade is the Cake Stand. When you ruin a cake with a wrong frost or decoration, don't throw it away. Put it on your Cake Stand and there's a 20% chance of being bought right away by an admiring customer. If you wish to be quicker on your feet dashing through your duties three times faster than normal speed, get yourself a pair of Smokin' Sneakers to get the most out of it.

What's for desert?

Cake Mania: Baker's Challenge has a bit of story behind it, which gives you a pretext to advance from location to location in all of 48 levels (months). You are a young girl named Jill, who just graduated from culinary school and when you return to your grandparents bakery, you find out that the property was bought by Mega-Mart and the old-fashioned bakery is... well, doomed. So, with your grandparents' recipes and equipment, you start your own business against the higher competitors and win back the property and the old bakery. This is where Jill begins her "adventure", advancing through the story in different locations, the first location being her home, next to the beach, the circus and finally in a casino in Vegas.

Additionally there's a cool bonus to the game called "Back to Bakery", where you buy your grandparents bakery back and compete for the best bakery in order to win a Hawaiian cruise.

How to be The Cake Master

In order to succeed in your task, you must pick the most impatient clients first. You must complete their order or they will leave. Sure, you can keep them longer in the bakery with cupcakes and the TV but this is the way to start. Second, you must pick the more sophisticated cakes over the simple ones. Making use of the Cake Stand is a smart way to complete your objective.

Cake Mania: Baker's Challenge is a good addition to the handheld titles, and will offer plenty of entertaining hours. With four game modes, Cake Mania, Back to Bakery, Custom Kitchen and Baker's Challenge, the game is recommended to all types of players and ages.

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Gameplay: 79

If the overall gameplay is looking great, the controls are not something to brag about. You can select the customers/oven/froster/tv... and so on with the D-Pad and it's not quite easy. Because it's a fast-paced action, your cursor will easily skip the desired target and you will have to go for it again. When a lot of clients are in line, you can give Jill multiple tasks like which color to frost the cake before it's out of the oven. But because of the poor control, your cake will sometimes frost the wrong color you selected. But in all my hours of gameplay, that didn't ruined the fun I had and I learned that you don't need to hurry, because you will always have just enough time to complete all the orders, unless you mess up.

Graphics: 73

The story of the game is presented in a comic book style, with balloon dialogs which is pretty cool and the customers are designed in such a way, you can easily tell which is what and who needs their cake faster.

Sound: 62

Nothing special about the sound or the music that is worth mentioning.

Multiplayer: N/A

It would have been fun to battle against online bakers, who would have achieved their goal first... stuff like that.

Hardware: 90

The game runs smooth but the frequent loading screens are a bit annoying.