Order Up! is a combination task-management/cooking game for the Nintendo Wii. I will say up front, in the interest of full disclosure, that I generally avoid task-management games like the plague. They are not my cup of tea. My daughter, however, loves, Loves, LOVES task-management games. I picked up Order Up! for her.

This is a single-player game, though onlookers are generally happy to backseat cook while they watch you play. Order Up! has both a story mode and a quick play mode. Unfortunately, you have to unlock the different venues in story mode before you can access them in quick play, other than you do have access to the starting restaurant.

I was happy to see that Order Up! has four potential save-game slots. This meant I could start a game from the beginning without disturbing the game my daughter already had going. I also got to pick Normal or Hard for the level of difficulty. I picked Normal.

Once I’ve started my game, I’m in a small plane on my way to the island of Port’Abello. I get to choose whether I want to be a boy chef or a girl chef. This is the extent of your character customization, but at least you get a choice — and really, for this kind of game, who needs to customize the appearance of your character anyway? It’s not like you’ll be looking at yourself in the mirror while you’re cooking. In either case, through the game, your character is simply referred to as “Chef.”

Your first stop, being homeless and destitute, is pointed out to you by the help-wanted sign in the window of the local Burger Face restaurant. You (of course) are hired, and then jump right into the tutorial. I will say that the tutorial did a good job of covering the basics of switching between food stations and preparing a basic burger and fries. I found out quickly that Order Up! definitely uses the motion capabilities of the Wii. I had to “flip” the remote to flip the burger, jerk the remote down or up to take the fries in or out of the hot oil, and move the remote appropriately to leaf the lettuce or chop the tomato.

On the plus side of the tutorial, you can repeat the final test as many times as you like. The Wii motions needed are shown on screen so you always have that visual clue of what motion you need to do. On the minus side, if you’ve already played the game, there is no way to skip or fast-forward through the tutorial — at least that I’ve seen.

Happily, you will only be working at Burger Face for the duration of the tutorial. After that, you get an amazingly generous loan that allows you to buy your own little place — the Gravy Chug. (Yeah ... I was staring at the name, too, and no, you don’t get to rename it.)

You have a lot of new options, some of which you don’t have access to immediately once you get your own place. Each day you begin out front of your place. You have a menu board showing which foods you’ve unlocked; there’s a phone booth where you can call a couple of different options or receive calls summoning you to the market; and a newspaper is delivered every morning that allows you to hire employees and/or make equipment or facility upgrades. All of this, of course, presumes you have made enough money to afford any of these goodies. Since you’re broke to begin with, it’s very nice that your first assistant cook is free — but then you get what you pay for, too.

Your new place is a filthy dive. You’ll see what I mean — but ick. I can’t imagine anyone actually coming in to this place to eat. My first priority was to do the clean up option — which costs 50 coins. Unfortunately, my dear child took over the controls while I was out of the room and spent all of our cash at the market. Sigh ...

Initially you only have three potential dishes to prepare. You have a waitress that you send to the tables. She takes the order from the assortment of odd customers (like the ships captain wearing a big bird on his head) and brings them to you. You click on each order to open your prep options. You can drag a prep piece onto your assistant (once you have him) to have him work on that while you work on something else. You can be prepping multiple things at once, like start the burger cooking, get the fries into the fryer and start cutting the tomato. You just need to keep a close eye on the cooking parts so nothing burns, you flip the burger at the right time, and nothing catches on fire.

Each dish has a certain quality level which will affect how much you get for it, plus the tip. In order to get a perfect dish, every part going into it has to be perfect. If you have it mostly great and one bad part, you’ll probably still have an acceptable dish. If you totally blow it on something, you do have a trashcan option so you can do that piece again. What you need to keep in mind is that speed matters, and apparently if you throw too much into the trash, you’ll attract rats. Ewww.

One of the early items you can unlock is the ability to buy spices and add them to the meals. There are different spices, and some of the clients will give you a hint as to which kind of spice they prefer. The right spice will up the value of the dish while the wrong spice will have the opposite affect. Here’s where I ran into my first big roadblock. The spice merchant requires you to play a minigame to unlock your ability to buy spices. Evidently I missed part of the instructions, because I could not get this to work. You’re supposed to trace shapes in the air, but nothing I did was registering. There’s nothing in the instruction book on how to do this (like if you’re supposed to hold a button or something), and I couldn’t find a way to get the instructions to repeat. I stepped out of the room briefly, and when I came back, my daughter had finished the minigame and already returned to the restaurant. Unfortunately, she can’t tell me what she did to get it to work. It was obviously easy and intuitive for her, but she has autism and cannot explain to me what it is she did.

The game progresses in complexity, like most task management games, as you go along. You have more different things you have to do, more customers to keep track of, and more personnel and equipment decisions to make. Apparently you can even unlock secret recipes by experimenting with the spices.

At random points in the game, like the spice merchant, little minigames will come up. There’s one where the health inspector drops in for a visit (uh-oh). You have a short amount of time to clean dishes with a sponge to his satisfaction in order to get a pass. My daughter loved this minigame.

Order Up! does have its own distinctive graphics style. Personally, it didn’t thrill me, but it’s definitely true to itself and does capture the feeling of cooking in a whacky world. The audio went well with the game — nothing particularly stood out, but then nothing ruined the feeling of the game either — which is always a good thing.

While I had some issues with following some of the instructions, they obviously got the job done with my 8-year-old daughter. She does need some help — like pointing out to her that the little assistant can actually help her do some of the cooking tasks she finds frustrating, but for the most part, she really does well with Order Up! She enjoys the cooking tasks. She now understands that if a task is frustrating her, she can give it to the assistant to do. Based on watching her play, she loves the game and I know she would recommend it. This is definitely a game that keeps her coming back for more.