Candivity

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Hole io & Candivity, along with Hole io.)

Candivity is a family-friendly physics-based Puzzle game released on Nintendo Switch in 2024 where players drop various tasty sweets onto the play field, trying to make two items of the same kind touch, causing them to combine and transform into a larger items. If this sounds familiar, it is because this premise and gameplay formula is very similar to Suika Game. Candivity does try to do things somewhat original by having different types of play fields to drop things into, as well as a few other changes, but… well, it’s still a Suika Game copycat.

Here’s where I enter my usual spiel about it being okay to be a copycat so long as it’s a good copycat, and asking whether Candivity is a good copycat. And Candivity does certainly try doing things to differentiate itself. Unfortunately, it often seems to do so poorly.

To its credit, one of the two included levels replaces Suika Game’s vertical well with a semi-circle that you drop things into from the edges, with them being pulled to the center, with the other one having slanted sides that offer something slightly different than Suika Game’s straight play area. However, the decision to partition off the game’s additional levels into paid DLC only highlights how little content is here, and even for only $3, this game seems lacking.

The game also adds power-ups that you can get on occasion, allowing you to do things like causing a pile-shifting explosion or teleporting your current held item directly to the item you want it to merge with. Unfortunately, these power-ups often have inconsistent results – sometimes explosions bounce out boulders you want to get rid of, sometimes they don’t, and there’s no real way to predict which will happen. Plus, picking up power-ups in the first place is a crapshoot due to poor hit detection.

Oh, and let’s not skip over those boulders I just mentioned. They’re an obstacle that players can normally only clear by making matches adjacent to them multiple times, which is not a bad idea to shake up the Suika Game formula. Unfortunately, the way matches work places the location of the match at the newest piece, meaning that matching a piece sitting right on top of a boulder may not do anything to damage it. Plus, boulders are tossed into your play field at irregular intervals, making them impossible to predict and account for – sometimes at a crucial time when you’re trying to line up a match, the game will drop two at once!

As if all of this wasn’t enough, even the core Suika Game gameplay here is pretty poor, with pieces often bouncing unpredictably, and with the chain of objects not seeming to have any rhyme or reason, mixing candies, fruit, and ice cream, making the game thematically incconsistent.

I suppose here’s where I talk about presentation, and it’s fine, with colorful, cartoony objects and backgrounds that are attractive enough, although once again they seem thematically inconsistent – some are just the edible object rendered in a cartoony style, and some have little smiley faces on them. I really feel like this game should just pick a lane. This is all backed by upbeat music that works but is completely forgettable.

What all this amounts to is that Candivity mostly looks decent for a Suika Game clone, and even has some interesting ideas, but at every turn the execution fails miserably. From content to mechanics to inconsistent theme to even the core gameplay, Candivity does nearly everything wrong. Even for only $3, you’re better off just getting the original Suika Game, or one of countless other clones on the eShop.

tl;dr – Candivity is a family-friendly physics-based Puzzle game where players drop sweet treats into the play field hoping to get sweets of the same kind to touch each other, combining into bigger sweets. This game is clearly copying Suika Game’s formula, and while it tries adding things to the formula, just about everything this game does fails in its execution. You’re better off just going with the original Suika Game, or one of countless other clones.

Grade: D

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