One of my guilty pleasures over the spring and summer was the Fox TV reality series, “Hell’s Kitchen.” Towards the end of the series, there was a commercial to visit the show’s website and play the game. It was a very cute idea like any of those funny Flash games on your PC, but it definitely wasn’t a full price retail game.

Needless to say, when the game was announced for the Wii, it was rather intriguing. There is a bunch of cooking games out on the Wii and the potential of combining one with a reality element sounded interesting. Unfortunately, Hell’s Kitchen is a straight up cooking game that is reminiscent of Diner Dash on a cell phone—without the fun.

You start in career mode. In this mode, you have to play the game for a week, which is broken into seven levels or days. Each day you have a special recipe to prepare. When you click on the recipe, you see six pages of instructions and think “how the heck am I going to make that in this game in the time allotted?” It’s rather intimidating – however it’s just a recipe.

You begin your week on Monday when traffic is light – only one party of two – and you’re the waiter and the chef. You seat the customers, take their order, cook their food, deliver their order and then clear the table. The cooking of the food is dumbed down to the point of stupidity. There’s nothing you do to prepare the food like in the cooking game Order Up. Instead you click vegetables and magically they are cut up ready to be cooked. The cooking gameplay is just plain awful. Where’s the slicing using the wii-mote? The shaking of the skillet? It’s not here.

The graphics are a mess – even by Wii standards. Virtual Gordon Ramsay looks like a cartoon. The restaurant looks similar to the one on TV but only with a few tables. The food barely looks like food. Good luck trying to figure out if the entrée needs vegetables or chicken. How can something like that be confusing? It beats me but it is in Hell’s Kitchen.

You could easily mistake this game for a Nintendo DS game – you’ll enjoy scrolling through Gordon’s speaking parts. That’s right…aside from some censored expletives; you’ll only be able to read Gordon’s comments. The audio is just plain terrible – ‘reality show’ noises here and there (dah-dah-dummm) which doesn’t even fit within the context of the game---it’s just downright pathetic.