Emily and her friends are tired of having to do all of the housework while their husbands lay around the house.  Therefore, they have a Father of the Year contest in order to teach them a lesson. Will the men learn anything or use this as an excuse to continue being lazy?

Be warned that this review contains spoilers, so proceed with caution.  First, I’d like to say that, when I first started playing the game, I had a huge fear that it would result in the latter.  There were times in the game when you’re supposed to have sympathy for the husbands’ failures, especially Mike. He is such an epic fail that, during the camping challenge, he didn’t pack enough supplies for his children but still managed to pack too much.  The characters even point out that he’s director of the parks department, so this should be his area of expertise. It gets so bad that Mike’s boss threatens to fire him if he doesn’t clean up his act. Let me explain that Sharon, without getting permission from the others, agreed to broadcast the Father of the Year contest on live television.  The fact that the parks department keeps a failure such as Mike employed at the park makes them look back. Thankfully, Stacy agrees to help but, instead of helping Mike be a better cook, she makes pancakes for him, gives them to him in secret and encourages him to tell everyone he made the pancakes. Don’t worry; everyone catches Mike and Stacy in the act.  Fortunately, for Mike, it’s the one time when the camera operator’s not around. At the end of the camping round, he chooses to stay in the competition so that he doesn’t disappoint his kids and ends up doing a not so terrible job at making pancakes.

Patrick, on the other hand, is good at being a fun dad but fails at being a responsible parent.  He can play with his kids, but he fails at laundry and only does chores around the house when Emily asks him to.  She calls him out on this during the contest when he questions Emily for giving him a four. Patrick ends up getting so competitive that, during the kite competition, he ignores Paige’s wish to keep the kite they made in order to make a superior kite that would be sure to beat Chad.  Patrick even gets angry with Emily, accusing her of wanting him to be more like Chad. He is Sharon’s husband who passes all of the challenges with flying colors, yet spends more time on business trips than he does with his family. However, Emily never said that Patrick needed to be more like Chad.  All she told Patrick was that he needed to improve his fathering skills because they have three children and Emily’s strained having to do all of the work herself. It’s something I pointed out in Miracle of Life when Emily was making excuses for Patrick, so I’m happy to see that she’s wising up about this.  Later on, Emily gets worried that Patrick’s desire to win is making him lose sight of what made him a good father, as I pointed out earlier. In the end, Emily and Sharon come up with the idea to have the final round be about how well the fathers know their children. It’s a challenge Patrick passes with flying colors and is even able to tell his kids apart when Chad switches the twins around so that Patrick will lose.  This challenge is worth double the points and, if you ask me, Patrick should’ve gotten more points just for being able to tell his kids apart despite the sabotage. Instead, they decide to give a four-way tie, something Chad doesn’t agree with which I’ll talk about later. Patrick comes up with the idea to make a special challenge for each father to give their kids a surprise and it’s worth no points. He even admits to Emily that the contest was a good idea because it helped him appreciate how hard Emily works.  As happy as I am about Patrick’s growth, it still brings up one question. I’m sure those of you who follow my blog know that Emily and Angela went on the Love Boat for a cruise while Patrick stayed behind to care for their kids. Since Patrick, at the time, was not a responsible father, what kind of mess did Emily come home to after she left the cruise?

Chad, Sharon’s husband, is the other side of the coin.  He’s good at cooking, cleaning and everything the contest has to offer in the beginning.  It’s something Sharon brags about and shows off to everyone even going so far as to allow a news channel to broadcast the contest without talking to the other women about it.  Sharon points out that it’s no different from Emily posting the contest on her blog, but she didn’t go behind everyone’s backs for her own ego. However, as I said earlier, Chad spends more time at work than he ever does with his family.  It’s what inspires Sharon to come up with the final challenge and show everyone that Chad’s not so perfect after all. During this challenge, he fails miserably at answering questions about Grace. It’s a scene I found rather funny and sad at the same time.  Patrick, despite being in competition with Chad, actually tries to help him out and fails. Whether Patrick does this more for Chad or Grace is up to the player to figure out. Personally, I think Patrick did it more for Grace because she was hurt that her own father didn’t know anything about her.  I’m sure there are some children who understand Grace’s pain. This inspires Chad to sabotage Patrick by switching their twins that, as I’ve pointed out, backfires. I also said that Chad is the only husband not satisfied with a four-way tie and talks to the reporter about having a sumo contest to determine the winner.  Since the whole point of this contest was to show the men what the women have to go through, this undermines the whole message and reinforces that it’s more important for men to be macho rather than being good people. It’s a message also supported by my mom’s least favorite car commercial. Unlike that commercial, the contest ends with Patrick about to win but forfeiting at the last minute when he sees his son crawling for the first time.  Despite Chad being the winner, Patrick gets the last minute footage for caring more about his kids than he does about the contest. In the end, Sharon breaks down because she admits to Emily that she’d rather have an imperfect husband that spends time with her and Grace than a perfect husband who’s never there. Chad overhears this and quits his job for Sharon, leaving her to worry about whether they’ll be poor because Chad has no job. Personally, if Chad’s job makes him enough money for them to own a beach house, I think they’ll have more than enough money saved up to stay rich.  However, they might want to keep a closer eye on their back account.

Last and, in my mind, most certainly least is Andy.  For those of you who haven’t played Miracle of Life, Andy is Mary-Lynn’s husband who abandoned her when she was pregnant.  Now, he wants to come back into her life and takes part in the contest to win Mary-Lynn’s heart. While Andy does mediocre on the chores at best, their baby, Levi, doesn’t know him because he’s never been around.  To me, this is a gray area. I haven’t forgiven Andy for abandoning his family, but I imagine it would be hard for Mary-Lynn to raise Levi on her own. In the end, she takes him back and he helps with the chores as well as raising Levi.

I explained that each father learns, in their own way, that they need to help with the domestic in their own way.  I also said that there were many times throughout the game that I feared the message would be, “fathers are useless at anything domestic so mothers should do everything.”  At first, it begins with elderly women saying that Emily’s generation is lucky because the men help. What they didn’t get is that the men often blew off their chores with Patrick refusing to get up at night and feed the twins.  Emily, Sharon and Mary-Lynn talk about this with Evelyn and Brigid, who both support the Father of the Year contest. At first, they mope about how mothers do all the work and fathers get all the credit. They even make jokes about events for the Father of the Year contest, which Emily, at first, finds a little too mean-spirited.  Brigid defends it by talking about how she had to raise Patrick and Kate by herself with no help from their father. Evelyn is, at first, proud of Edward for vacuuming, until she realizes that she’s been praising her husband for doing one chore around their house. Meanwhile, she is stuck with the lion’s share. Patrick refusing to get up in the night and take care of their babies is the final straw for Emily.  At the end, each of their husbands agree to do more chores around the house. Patrick even does the dishes without Emily having to tell him and gets up in the night to take care of the babies. Evelyn even tells Edward that he has to do an equal amount of chores as she does when cleaning from now on.

The game play is just as it was in Miracle of Life, with you preparing products and giving them to standing or seated customers.  You have to clean up after the seated customers as soon as they leave.

Then you find the mouse in each level and complete a challenge to get the diamond for that level.  You also get to play optional challenge levels to earn more diamonds but don’t enhance the story in any way. If you’re still low on diamonds, you can play the daily challenge to get more.  During each level, you have to take part in mini-games that tend to distract from the game rather than add to it.

It’s similar to what Heart’s Medicine and Dr. Cares would do, except the mini-games were about treating patients.  This helped add to the experience while, in Delicious, it more distracts you from your goal. It’s similar to when Sally’s Quick Clips tried to do a match 3 game and failed. In that case, they learned their lesson and went back to the original style.  Since the makers used this in Miracle of Life before making this game, you can see that this isn’t the case with them. You can buy upgrades between levels to make your gaming experience easier. As for the diamonds, you use them to purchase decorations for Emily’s backyard.  Unfortunately, you have to buy both variations if you want to get that trophy; one of the many that you can win in the game. The game play also supports the storyline in the last venue, where you play as Patrick giving Emily a break from running her restaurant. However, I do wonder who’s running his flower shop.  You can also higher Mike as a cleaner for the last venue, with the description explaining that it’s one of his first lessons on domestic work.

This game has a good storyline, but doesn’t really entertain as it should.  I give it 6 out of 10; love the message, not crazy about the game play.