Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido

Genre: Unlimited Pattern Puzzle

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local, Local Wireless, Online)

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Review:

Sushi Striker is a fast-paced Puzzle game where players match like-colored plates of sushi as they whiz by on conveyor belts, competing with a human- or computer-controlled opponent doing the same, with each side looking to clear enough plates to use as ammunition to down their opponent. This game was released on 3DS and Nintendo Switch in 2018.

The presentation here is fairly simple, but good, featuring fully-animated anime-style story sequences, with the actual gameplay largely represented by colorful hand-drawn 2D visuals. Nothing impressive, but it’s still fairly appealing, and does a great job of conveying the cartoony, colorful world of the game, which itself is a fairly odd but interesting world where an oppressive government has just suppressed a sushi rebellion and now hoards the world’s dwindling supply of sushi for itself.

As for the gameplay, players use either the touchscreen or control stick to select sushi, looking to chain together like-colored plates in as large a combo as possible. As these plates are constantly in motion, this makes the ability to chain together combos a constantly-shifting affair, meaning that this is a game that falls heavily on the “reflex” side of arcadey puzzle games, as players won’t be doing much planning of their moves.

I should mention that both control schemes in this game work okay, but both feel flawed in some way – the touchscreen doesn’t always make it clear which plates you can combo to and which are too far, and the control stick simply isn’t as elegant at selecting plates, plus the way players hold down a button will make for repeatedly accidentally making new selections unintentionally.

However, I’d say one of the biggest flaws here is in the visual presentation, as the sushi often covers up so much of the plates that it’s hard to view the board as a whole and get a feel for the best way to match plates, especially with them constantly moving. As a result, it feels like what you end up doing more often than not is just looking for a bunch of like-colored plates together and hoping that the rest of the screen has enough to make that a worthwhile combo.

The other major flaw this game has is its price. $50 is an oabsolutely outrageous price tag for a game that feels like an extremely-polished mobile game. Yes, the animated cutscenes and overall look of this game is good, but the gameplay is so simple and shallow that this feels like the sort of thing I might’ve downloaded for free on my phone, and that is absolutely not what I expect from a game with a hefty price tag like that.

Sushi Striker has some fun fast-paced Puzzle gameplay, and it’s overall not a terrible game, but it has multiple issues, and it is priced far, far, far too high for the sort of experience it offers. You can get better Puzzle games for less money on the Switch, and I’d recommend you stay away from this game until it sells for a severe discount.

tl;dr – Sushi Striker is a fast-paced Puzzle game where players clear like-colored plates of sushi from constantly-moving conveyor belts. There’s some fun gameplay here, but the game has some minor control issues, frustrating issues with the visual presentation that interfere with the gameplay, and an insultingly high price tag for this sort of game. It may be worth playing for fans of the genre, but only if it gets a severe discount.

Grade: C+

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