s novel as it is to throw together food with touch/motion controls in the Cooking Mama series, it feels like you are creating meals to display in a museum rather than for people to eat. The developers of Order Up get this, and let a series of wacky customers give voiced feedback on your cooking rather than using a sterile grading system. You’ll start to recognize certain patrons’ preferences, like the cowboy who likes his meat extra burnt or the uptight food critic who makes no attempt to avoid special treatment. This injection of personality adds a lot to what could have been another minigame collection.

Players start out flipping burgers in a fast food joint and move on to purchase their own Mexican, Italian, and French-themed restaurants, eventually competing in an Iron Chef send up. You’re encouraged to prepare multiple elements at once (boil pasta, grill kebabs, dice tomatoes, etc.), but you have to move extremely slowly to come close to angering a customer.

In fact there really isn’t a way to fail, per se, at Order Up. Poor playing merely results in a smaller payday. I’d prefer a little more stress and risk, especially in the end. Even though the game’s not particularly tough, the quest for maximum kitchen efficiency is just as addicting as task management sims. After all, the better you are, the faster you earn new assistant chefs, equipment upgrades, recipes, and restaurants.

Completing Order Up shouldn’t take more than 10 hours (take note that the in-game clock only counts kitchen time). About halfway through, however, repetition fatigue sets in. You perform the same five feats for four separate restaurants (earn X dollars, buy X number of recipes, etc.) with only a negligible blip in ­difficulty.

The final sequence is so charming that it makes me wish there were more story cut-scenes throughout the game. As it stands, all of the light drama is mashed into the last 15 minutes.