Developer: IndieZero

Publisher: Nintendo of America

Platform: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo 3DS

A Review Copy Was Provided by Nintendo

Indieszero, known for their work on the Theatrerhytm games, have brought us a brand new IP with an interesting concept. Sushi Striker is a puzzle action title, set in a world where Sushi was outlawed due to the dish causing wars and strife. The main campaign is a silly, shonen-like story that is incredibly entertaining if you just turn your brain off, and enjoy the humorous writing. This premise is way too ridiculous to be taken seriously, but it seems that way on purpose.

You’ll be in this mode a lot as the single player can range from ten to almost 25 hours. It has a lot of meat to it due to reasonably sized list of levels and missions. Though, trying to 100% the campaign became quite tedious as every level needed to be replayed at most three times to fully complete. Tedium aside, the core gameplay is addicting, fast, and very fun. After every mission, you will gain experience that go towards level ups to increase your HP, and attack strength.

The goal in Sushi Strikers gameplay is to stack as many plates of Sushi of the same color as possible, then letting go to pile up your total amount of plates. Then you will fling them at your opponents to cause them to take damage. Once the health bar depletes to zero, you win. You can toss them right away, or build up a stack, and increase your damage. Then there’s the Sushi Sprites which give the player abilities such as a shield and make your opponents lanes move faster.

The game quickly rewards on the fly thinking, as well as patience, and planning. This all applies to your opponent as well, and you’ll be competing to keep those combos up since there are seven sushi belts constantly moving. You and your opponent have three each and one shared. This gives the game a competitive edge for matches with two human players, leading to very fun times, or the loss of your best friend, whether it be locally on one screen, two screens, or online.

The game supports every control option the Switch has to offer, but the absolute best one is touch screen. Being in full control of your combo thanks to the added precision is a pure blessing. This game is perfect for handheld play as the art is much crisper on the Switch display, and overall much better suited for handheld play due to the casual pick up and play nature of puzzle games.  Every control option still does the job very well, but in this case touching is good.

The weakest area of Sushi Striker is the overall presentation. The art direction just doesn’t do anything for me, as the faces on many characters are off-putting, and the designs are generally not memorable. At first glance, the title looks like a flash game, which is caused by the art style being too simplistic for its own good. The English voice acting is pretty underwhelming, with some actors giving poor delivery on various lines, but offering a better performance on other lines. The inconsistency was very distracting, and with no dual audio option this is very limiting to the player. The sound design issues don’t stop at acting, as the soundtrack is pretty underwhelming outside of that absurdly fun opening intro. The music is frantic, it fits the game, but it just never stuck around unfortunately.

Overall, Sushi Striker offers a fun frantic experience that shows that any silly premise can be made into something enjoyable. Underwhelming experience with the presentation aside, this game is so fun, it was almost completely surprising in of itself that it was this good. The price of entry is ten Dollars more than the 3DS version, but with no big differences between either the choice is entirely up to you. However, 50 USD is pretty steep for this title. Try the demo on the eshop, and go from there.