Sausage Wars

Genre: Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Sausage Bundle: Till the Last Drop of Ketchup, along with Run Sausage Run!. It is also in Best Mobile Games 5-in-1, along with Dig Deep, Om Nom: Run, Pudding Monsters, and Run Sausage Run!.)

Sausage Wars, elsewhere released under the title Sausage Wars.io, is an Arcade-style Party Game released on mobile devices in 2019, ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022, then to PlayStation 4 in 2023, then to PC in 2024. This game has players fighting as anthropomorphic sausages in an enclosed arena, trying to be the last one left alive.

The presentation here makes use of pretty simple 3D visuals, with sausages dressed up as various silly characters, including Joker and Minecraft’s Steve. This is joined by a pretty repetitive energetic background theme, cartoony punching sound effects, and silly high-pitched screams with each death.

Players have only one control input in the game, and that’s moving around. Once you stop moving, the momentum will fling the top part of your sausage ahead of you to attack anyone within range, knocking them back. Knock them off the stage or into a hazard, and they’re eliminated, and your sausage grows bigger.

There is some nice visceral fun to be had here in simply moving around and whacking enemies, trying to position yourself to get in a hit that will send them to their doom while trying to keep yourself from being placed in the same situation. However, when multiple characters pile up on top of one another, it stops feeling strategic and just seems chaotic. And even if this doesn’t bother you, the lack of any variety in the gameplay beyond different stages makes this gameplay get stale pretty quickly.

Even beyond this, Sausage Wars has a problem with terrible hit detection, with hits that shouldn’t connect often making an impact even when they clearly just hit air. What’s more, sometimes hits inexplicably do nothing, even though they clearly connected.

Because of the repetition and the flawed gameplay, what would have been a pretty good Party Game is merely okay. I do think you can still get some fun out of Sausage Wars in a party situation, but don’t expect to be playing this for very long before everyone wants to play something else.

tl;dr – Sausage Wars is an Arcade-style Party game where players take the role of anthropomorphic sausages trying to whack each other off the stage or into hazards. There’s some good visceral fun to be had here, but the gameplay is too repetitive and has far too many issues to make this last long before your party wants to move on to other things.

Grade: C+

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