Cake Mania 3 is an adorable time-management game for the Nintendo DS. Jill, our heroine from Sandlot Games’ PC versions of the Cake Mania imprint, is cheerfully preparing for her wedding day when she accidentally breaks a time-bender (I suppose it was wedding decor), and sends herself and her loved ones off through space and time, only to be saved through extensive cake baking! Jill must rescue her displaced friends and family, repair the time-bender and make it back for her wedding  – all by making and decorating cakes.

Once Jill lands in a new location and sets up her bakery (“Oh look, “ Jill notices, “My oven works in ancient China! That’s not weird at all!”), the top screen is used for progress stats, like time spent and money earned, and icons of waiting customers.  The bottom screen is Jill’s bakery. Players send Jill rushing from oven to customer with a tap of the stylus. A checkmark appears over the future actions in Jill’s queue so you can easily keep track of what she’s doing. Tap the checkmark to remove a planned action from Jill’s to-do list.

In each level, from ancient China to renaissance fair England to the French revolution (insert your own cake-eating joke here), Jill needs to bake, decorate and sell cakes to make a goal amount of cash in a day. Whether it’s a Chinese emperor or an Egyptian pharaoh who needs a cake, the customers are always adorable. Jill needs to complete the assigned days successfully to rescue the friend stuck in that time and help repair the time-bender, but don’t worry, if you can’t complete a level successfully, you’ll be able to take the cash you’ve managed to earn, buy some upgrades and try again. Spend your money on new appliances, new clothes and other improvements to Jill’s magically time-traveling bakery.

The difficulty on this game is perfect. Except for a cake-boxing minigame with confusing instructions, there was never a level that I struggled with, but they were never easy enough to become dully repetitive.  It is always a challenge to developers to make the difficulty ladder rungs on a time management seem like more than an endless cycle of making more money to get better stuff to make money to get better stuff to make money to …  well, you get the picture. Fortunately, the challenge is just right and, the cute cakes, the wild cake-buying characters and zany storyline, not to mention Jill’s asides between rounds, keep players from getting bored of this game.

Jill’s cakes, cappuccinos, and other treats are adorable, but the size of the DS screen and similar color choices make it hard to distinguish between, say, a red cake with red frosting or a plain red cake.  Although it’s not a game-breaking problem, it’s a minor annoyance that leaves me wondering why CM3 decided to stick with such a small variety of colors.

Fans of the time-management game genre have a real gem with Cake Mania 3. This is a perfect game for a handheld like the Nintendo DS, allowing players to take Jill and her time-traveling bakeshop around for quick games in the waiting room or on the train, and the cute cake-making fun can easily pull players in for longer playtime.

Article Written by Meg Stivison

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Meg Stivison is a freelance games journalist based in Raleigh, NC. She blogs at SimpsonsParadox.com