Baking Life may be the first bakery-themed game on Facebook, but at heart it's still a clone. Baking Life plays exactly like any given specimen of the restaurant sim genre, pioneered by Restaurant City and popularized by Café World. Where restaurant sims typically let you create dishes ranging from savory to sweet, Baking Life focuses completely on baking pies, cakes, cookies, and other luxuriant desserts. Most of the foods you can make are representations of fattening real-world dishes, though you'll also run across exotic concoctions like the Floating Castle Cake. Baking Life offers almost all of the exact same features and gameplay mechanics as the restaurant games that inspired it. You use ovens to make food, which you can serve when the food's timer runs down. Served food goes into a display case, so you can't serve something if there's no display case free. There's an optional coffee-serving mini-game that works exactly like its Café World counterpart, except you can level your coffee machine up to eventually serve decaf coffee and tea. You unlock recipes as you level up, though Baking Life doesn't feature anything like Café World's recipe mastery yet. You need to hire friends to work in your shop as quick as you can, since the temporary workers you're stuck with otherwise cut into your margins.
