Cake Mania To The Max

Cake Mania®: To the Max! Feather your hair and flip up your collar for the raddest Cake Mania® yet! Flashback to the neon-soaked 80's and help a teenage Jill Evans™ find her true calling. Like most high school students in the Bakersfield High Class of '89, Jill doesn't have a clue as to what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

• Mar 18, 2019  I love the Cake Mania series. Like many others I was looking for a fresh, new challenge in To the Max! What I got; however, was the same game as before, but with ridiculously complicated requests that were pretty much impossible to fulfill and earn full marks.
• Flashback to the neon-soaked 80's and help a teenage Jill Evans™ find her true calling in Cake Mania®: To the Max!, the highly anticipated sixth chapter in one of the most popular time management series of all-time!

Poor Jill: she has to finish high school, go to the prom, decide what she will study at college, and she has to run the cake shop for her arthritic grandmother. On paper she already looks like a real miss goody-two-shoes. In reality, though, I suspect that she is insane. Also, I have lost all sympathy with grandmother, just sitting there and doing nothing, all while the cake shop gets busier and busier. Really, can't she take the orders or something? But slave labor is an inevitable theme in the world of these speed-based puzzle games. Get ready to peddle sweet loafs in Cake Mania: To the Max.

Cake Mania To The Max Walkthrough

Games such as Cake Mania require a deft balancing act as to always stay one step ahead of your increasingly impatient customers. Jill manages her grandmother's cake shop: this means she takes the orders, makes the cake, renders the frosting (and whatever other decorations are required) and delivers the concoction before the customer walks off in a huff. If someone gets a bit impatient, you can calm them down with a cookie or two — the happier they are, the more the customers tip, which works towards reaching your daily target.

Cakes come in many shapes, so orders can be simple single layer creations or multi-level monstrosities. To help you keep ahead of the rush (for clearly grandma has no plans to hire some additional help), you can upgrade elements about the shop to increase your productivity or income. Nice walls and counters mean better tips, floor upgrade improve Jill's speed and splashing out on the oven or additional frosting bays is always a smart idea. Alas, money comes in very slowly and to reach the full glory of grandma's bakery will take most of the dozens of levels on offer ('levels' being used loosely — every stage is the same shop, but with your upgrades and increasingly demanding customers).

Analysis: Cake Mania: To the Max is a challenging game — beyond titles like Family Restaurant; where your actions and focus there can be very singular, Cake Mania will have you run from pillar to post as you try and bring multiple orders together. Thankfully the grading scale it uses — being able to hit the daily cash target — is pretty forgiving. In addition, you can make a lot of mistakes and still finish a level. Strictly speaking it doesn't appear possible to lose a level, but you can fall short on the expected takings for the day.

If you have a knack for games that require mouse speed and dexterity combined with a good short-term memory, this game is ridiculously fun. It is a bit strange, really, that Cake Mania is wrapped in such a cutesy package — one that regularly solicited sneers and grunts from my more macho friends. A game about making cake? Despite what it ways on the tin, this is not Cake Mania's gig. It just pretends to bake cakes. In reality it is testing your cobra-like mouse skills. The buying of upgrades and equipment breakdowns create an extra dimension and Cake Mania has a lot more depth than it suggests.

There is an additional activity where you can rearrange the customers standing around (since some do not like others). This seems a bit too much, especially when different customers have different demands: cheerleaders tend to form groups, oil barons will supersede everyone (sometimes useful, sometimes a disaster), the 'dudes' will take anything, brides tend to be more impatient and so forth. Understanding all of these quirks is ultimately the key to serious players who intend to take on the clock. But they are less of an issue if you prefer to play at your own pace.

If acts of great speed and agility is your idea of a fun puzzle game (and it certainly is mine), the new Cake Mania hits the sweet spot, even though it has some areas that can be improved. It is certainly one of the best in the genre, whatever that might be.

Windows:
Download the demo
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Cake Mania To The Max How To Put In Cheat

Mac OS X:
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Try Boot Camp or Parallels or CrossOver Games.

Cake Mania: To The Max! goes back to its roots with great success.

Jill Evans is back for Cake Mania: To the Max, the sixth part of this highly popular time management brand. But what can be done in a series that has already covered time-travelling, managing different shops, or building bakeries from scratch? Well, it’s time-travelling again, only this time around the player will get a glimpse into Jill’s past, namely, her high school days in the 1980s.

Cake Mania: To the Max features a whopping 100 levels, and can be played in both timed and relaxed mode. As with former titles the first couple of levels are somewhat boring and slow, but it is definitely worth it to keep hanging on. In contrast to the last two games in the series you are not managing different shops – in fact the whole game takes place in one single bakery. This might sound a bit monotonous at first, but veteran Cake Mania fans will surely appreciate the focused but more substantial gameplay resulting from this change.

Basically, all you have to do is prepare cakes for customers. By clicking shapes, frostings in different colors, varying toppings or fruits and creating multilayered cakes according to the incoming orders of your customers Jill earns money that she needs to pass the day successfully. This process of cake creation is complicated enough on its own, but not only do your customers lose patience rather quickly, they each have distinct personalities whose behavior affects the gameplay considerably.

The gypsy, for example, will show you the orders of other customers immediately; the oil baron will not allow you to serve other customers before his order is finished, while the wizard will turn all customers into cheerleaders, thereby changing their orders. Those special – and not always helpful – abilities are not the only interesting features about Jill’s customers, though. Some of them dislike each other, such as the bride and the business man. If they stand next to each other they will lose patience, which brings us to a welcome new feature of Cake Mania: To the Max: swapping.

Now you are able to swap customers to a different place, which adds a whole new level of challenge and strategy to the game. Not only do you have to plan according to the abilities of certain customers, but you also have to keep an even closer eye on their patience, because details like that can be neglected quickly in a game as hectic as Cake Mania: To the Max. It is also good to see that the game has kept interesting features such as the rush bonus, for which you have to do the same action three times in a row numerous times for it to be activated. The rush bonus then finishes every action immediately, which makes for a frantic but entertaining experience.

The upgrade system works as smoothly as ever and has been enhanced quite a bit. Besides the well-known upgrades for machines that include both speed boosts and new toppings, oven slots and fruits, the player is also able to upgrade the interior of the bakery in ways that actually impact the gameplay. In the beginning the upgrades seem rather expensive, but this impression is deceiving, and the whole system will surely please time management perfectionists. The ability to swap or sell machines only improves this already stellar feature.
What has always been interesting about this series, and matters even more in this latest sequel, is that the challenge of it never depended on the timed aspect, but more on dealing with the varying customer types and handling all those different shapes, layers, colors and toppings at the same time. While the first ten or twenty levels will be a breeze for experienced players, later levels get extremely challenging and at times even frustrating. Fortunately it is possible to choose between timed and relaxed mode at the beginning of each level, so that you will never really get stuck.

The graphics of Cake Mania: To the Max are absolutely gorgeous and charming, and it is nice to see how much this game has evolved since the first part. The controls are flawless save for one glaring oversight: you are still not able to cancel actions, which is especially frustrating in a detail-oriented game like this, where one wrong cake can seriously mess up the player’s strategy.

Cake Mania To The Max Game

But all in all there is no doubt that we fully recommend Cake Mania: To the Max to all avid time management game fans. The series goes back to its original roots, which might be disappointing for some people, but has been managed excellently nevertheless. A charming storyline, a complex upgrade system, proven gameplay with some interesting tweaks and a far above average playtime provide an entertaining experience for fans of the series and newcomers alike.