For: PC

Rating: 4 Lunchables and a burp

Reviewed by: Ib Sanchez

Selecting Kraft ingredients from the food picker wheel is easier than a trip to your pantry.

Kraft Foods, hoping to reach a new generation of consumers, has teamed up with Megalon World Props, the creator of MMORPG hits Gastroverse and Pandora’s Pie, to build a new food-centric multiplayer world featuring Kraft’s family of congestible products. Kraft products appear as game elements, characters and even weapons that players use as they gather ingredients and cook healthful (or at least tasty) dishes that will appease the game’s NPC “master chefs”. For instance, after collecting Ritz crackers from the Whole Wheat Forest, players can combine them with Jell-O Instant Pudding and a 15 minute, 300 degree baking spell to create a creamy dessert pie that will satisfy three Dingus Chefs and a Maw Dragon. Or maybe you encounter a Gutbloid in the Crustal Divide of Bing; just toss it a raw DiGiorno pizza and the little dickens will belch itself out of existence while you go on about your quest. The variety embodied in the game’s 12 culinary regions keeps players constantly shifting their tactics as tastes in one region will be considered unacceptable abominations in another. Fortunately, players can team up in cooking guilds to share knowledge and ingredients. Perhaps the most innovative feature of the game (and its most controversial) is the use of coupon codes from actual product boxes that are redeemable in World of Cheese Kraft shops for utensils, spells, and ingredients. I must confess ripping through a package of Oreos to get the code that helped me purchase the Golden Ladle. And I can tell you that it was worth every crumb! But I also suspect parents (or the person who buys the household groceries) may balk at buying an extra dozen Cool Whips just so some Cheesy voyager can rent a gondola to travel through the Soup Canals of Ixpixia. Beyond the commercial aspects of the game, I found it to be a surprisingly fresh and light take on the MMORPG genre–a nice snack between courses of heavier fare.