What's For Dinner 2 - Dangit. Now I'm hungry.

I found What's For Dinner 2 in the "time management" section of Candystand, and at first I thought it was going to be a diner-dash style game. I was wrong. ^_^

What's For Dinner 2 (abbreviated to WFD2 from here on) is a restaurant game, but the focus is on creating the meals and not on serving customers.

You start out by opening a cookbook.

All of the recipes are listed on this page. Once you pick a meal to try you'll head to the cooking instructions. This lists every step of the recipe along and includes a difficulty rating.

From there you go to a kitchen pantry and fridge. Here you'll pick out all of the ingredients that you need.

The clock doesn't start until you click "Proceed," so I cheat a little. *^_^* I'll look at the list and try to find everything on the shelves before I click to go on.

For most recipes, the next stage is peeling the veggies. You get more points for staying in the guidelines and for being quick.

I'm not sure why, but for some reason I really love peeling the potatoes. *^_^*

After peeling you get to slice & dice!

Slice & dice is almost exactly like peeling, except that you make more cuts. (I have weak wrists and the repetitive motion became uncomfortable. If you have any wrist injuries of your own, you may want to pass WFD2 by.)

In a few recipes you get to squeeze a lemon! ^_^

This one is tricker than it looks. Unlike peeling and slicing, speed is NOT a good thing. If you go too fast the bar will turn red and you'll lose points. :(

Afterwards you'll measure the remaining ingredients into a measuring cup. Follow the guide to lift and pour. When you're close to the desired amount, move your cursor away and it will stop pouring. It's not an immediate effect, so give yourself a little bit of wiggle room. It's better to slightly underpour than to overpour.

Once everything is prepped it's time to mix it all together! You have a time line, and when the green bar reaches an action, you have to finish the action before the green bar moves out of the bracket. For actions like "add this" or "High" it's very easy. All you do is click the ingredient or temp.

Actions like "Saute," "Shake," and "Stir," mean you have to move the mouse around, and fast!

Sometimes the time lines are boringly easy, like the pic above. Waiting isn't very fun IMHO. Recipes that have a packed time line are much more interesting and fun!

Now THAT was a fun round! I was constantly in action, and there was a lot of variety in what I had to do. ^_^

After everything is cooked you plate the meal and get your final score!

Ta-da!!

Tips and Tricks

When searching for ingredients, remember that the shrimp are not in the fridge! They are in a CAN! I had to do the shrimp recipe 3 times before I figured that out. Oi.

For the longest time I kept failing "Stir" during cooking. I finally figured out you need to go CLOCKWISE for it to work.

To maximize your tickets, submit your score after EACH recipe. Candystand will save your progress and you can hop right in to do another recipe.


Final Rating

WFD2 isn't my usual type of game, but I had fun trying it out. ^_^ Unfortunately, the replay value is really low. To get a gold trophy you need 110,000 points. After playing each recipe once, I had 139,000 points. Not exactly a challenge.

I like that you can jump into any recipe at any time and don't have to go in order. But honestly, after playing through once, I didn't feel a need to play through it again. WFD2 is a decent game, it's just not one that I will come back to.

3 out of 5 stars.