Heavy Machinery vs Shumai

Genre: Arcade / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Heavy Machinery vs Shumai is an Arcade-style game of sorts released in 2026 on Nintendo Switch. In this game, players use the two analog sticks to control one of four varies construction vehicles with the goal of knocking a tiny pea off of a small piece of shumai. Why? Because why not.

The presentation here is good, with colored line art 2D depictions of the vehicles, a small table and food on it, and a background with a vague construction site, all backed by a simple theme that plays as you work. It’s all in a style that reminds me strongly of some of the microgames from the WarioWare franchise, so much that if you showed me this without context and said it was a prototype for a WarioWare microgame, I would easily believe it.

The main idea behind the gameplay is that each machine has eight distinct controls using the two analog sticks – one control for each cardinal direction. These controls can be to change the movement of the vehicle, the angle of the arm on an excavator, forklift, crane, or bulldozer, the angle of its shovel or scoop, extending out a telescoping arm, and so on. Using these controls, you must knock over the pea and only the pea – you can’t touch the shumai or table. And the ultimate goal is to find each way to do this with each vehicle, basically every type of movement or vehicle part you can use to knock off the pea.

There’s some skill involved here, and a really delicate touch required with the analog stick to get it precisely right, given that you’re moving something large and trying to only touch something very small. Unfortunately, the game only briefly provides a zoomed-in view of the pea, and not while you’re actually working on removing it, and it’s frustrating that they don’t give players an option to better see the tiny thing they’re aiming for.

It’s also frustrating that players can only use the analog sticks for controls, since it’s far too easy to accidentally use multiple analog stick controls at once. Some ability to turn off functions or map controls would have been nice, especially since the default controls for some machines are unintuitive.

I should mention that this game hides within it an unlockable second game… sort of. The game is Heavy Machinery vs Toothbrush and… well, it’s basically the same thing, but you’re trying to scrape half the toothpaste off of a toothbrush. This makes things different enough to make for a slightly different challenge. I was hoping that there would be more variations after this… knocking a meatball off a plate of spaghetti, perhaps? But alas, no, just the two it seems.

Overall, I think Heavy Machinery vs Shumai is a cute idea, and it’s unique enough to make it a fun curiosity, but it loses steam pretty quickly even for a $2 game. With only four vehicle types and two objects to interact with, there’s not much variety. The game would be much-improved by giving players more freedom to set up their own preferred control scheme. And the way the game removes magnification during gameplay makes it harder to even see what you’re doing. As a result, Heavy Machinery vs Shumai is a cute idea and an interesting oddity, but not one you’ll likely want to play for more than a few minutes before moving on.

tl;dr – Heavy Machinery vs Shumai is an Arcade-style game of sorts that has players using heavy construction machinery to knock a pea off the top of a piece of shumai. It’s a silly concept, but unfortunately control issues, a lack of variety, and the difficult-to-see nature of the gameplay all add up to make this little more than a quirky oddity, rather than an actual fun game to play.

Grade: C-

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