The Japanese indie developer SAT-BOX is getting lazy in my opinion. I have given them two must plays in the past, one for Extreme Bike X and one for Sushi Shot. However, they increased their pace to two games a month. As a result, their usual decent quality is slipping drastically. How do I know? Enter Sushi Drop, which uses all of the same assets as Sushi Shot, including music, sushi and UI. This is on top of the fact the game is a mediocre stacking game, where you drop sushi into order to build a high tower of sushi.

There are two main modes in Sushi Drop, Score attack, where you just build as high a tower as you can, and Battle, where you take turns dropping sushi until one of you drops a sushi off the board. The problem here is the physics, it sucks and makes no sense. Why does some sushi stick in place and other pieces do not? Don’t know. See the yellow egg sushi about the salmon piece in the pic above? Normally, it should slide off, but it does not. Therefore, The physics inconsistency sinks the game instantly. This is regardless of how good the rest of it, and the rest of it is honestly alright.

SAT-BOX needs to slow it down and take their time. Sushi Drop is mediocre at best, and I know they can do better, they have done better. This gets a Not Recommended with a five back-end score. If they patched the physics to make things consistent, I’d probably give Sushi Drop a much better verdict and score, but as it is, it gets what it gets.

Overall: Sushi Drop could have been a lot better, and should be a lot better. But terrible physics sinks it. SAT-BOX, do better!

Verdict: Not Recommended

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And there it goes, any good will Big Way earned with the surprisingly good Love Island. Lovely Crush is their follow up and while it isn’t bad, it isn’t particularly worth a purchase either. This is a pop blocks-style game where you pop connecting blocks. I’ve reviewed a bunch of these, including Eroblast. Lovely Crush simply fails to distinguish itself game-play wise from similar cohorts, and honestly, I found it rather boring. Just board after board, with similar power-ups and obstacles. There is no tutorial, but you do not need one. You know exactly what to do here, as you’ve done it before.

The real draw, if you want to call it that, is to unlock pictures of anime cat-girls. Except they are AI-generated. Not only that, there are nude anime cat-girls on the Switch in the form of Neko Secret Room and its sequel Neko Secret Homecoming. Both those games are trash, but the images aren’t ai-generated and they’re nude. No such luck with Lovely Crush, which gets a T rating. In there end, this game has been done elsewhere and done better, both in terms of the puzzle game play and the anime cat girls.No reason to buy it. No reason to play. Lovely Crush gets a Not Recommended with a four back-end score.

Overall: Lovely Crush is routine block-popping puzzler with AI-generated cat-girls. Both halves of this game have been done elsewhere, and done better.

Verdict: Not Recommended

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I wanted to like Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic. A story-based pinball game sounds kind of cool. The issue is, other, better, Pinball games exist; Pinball FX3 and Zaccaria Pinball, to be exact. The tables you have to play on are simple and not very interesting, and I played on more than one. They lack the bell and whistles of those other tables, and lack complexity. Let me show you:

This table is what you see is what you get. The table is spartan and fairly straightforward. Granted, it bares a resemblance to the older Zaccaria tables, but that’s the point, the genre has moved on, Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic has not. Sure there’s a story about a witch trying to destroy the world and the raccoon standing up to her, but its just window dressing for severe boredom. To be fair, there are a lot of tables and modes, including a side mode with special tables like skeeball or “Pinchinko”, but its simply not enough to hold my attention.

But what really sinks Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic is the slightly delay in pressing the flipper buttons and the flipper flipping. I lost a lot of balls because the flipper didn’t flip fast enough. But even without it, the tables aren’t interesting and the whole thing lacks a coat of polish that is necessary in today’s ePinball. I just can’t recommend this. It was a valiant effort, but required a few more months in the oven. Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic gets a Not Recommended verdict with a four back-end score.

Overall: Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic is an ambitious story-based pinball game, except the pinball is stuck in the past and the whole thing lacks polish.

Verdict: Not Recommended

eShop Page

Game received for free from the publisher.

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Jigsaw Puzzle Fever makes Jigsaw Ice Princess look like a masterpiece, and that game sucked. I’m not kidding, this is atrocious. I failed the first puzzle, twice, because you can’t put the puzzle pieces back. You see on the bottom of the screen is a line of pieces, you pick up a piece and put it on the board, but it snaps into place. If it is correct, it shines few a second and becomes unmovable. IF its wrong, it just sits there, but you can’t move pieces off the board, nor can you switch them by dropping another piece on them. So towards completion, if the pieces are in the wrong place and there’s no place to move, game over and start again. Awful design choice!

It is especially disappointing because Jigsaw Puzzle Fever has some good ideas, like some difficulties have you rotate the pieces into the correct orientation. However, that just gives you more opportunities to fail miserably here. Unless there’s a time limit, you should not be able to fail in jigsaw puzzle game. It defeats the purpose of being a jigsaw puzzle game, relaxing. There’s a decent amount of puzzles, but its so badly designed you’re not going to want to play it. No wonder the publisher gave out the keys freely on Keymailer, it is the only way people would touch it. Jigsaw Puzzle Fever gets a Not Recommended with a 3 back-end score. It only avoided the Garbage verdict because of the rotation feature.

Overall: JIgsaw Puzzle Fever is the worst designed jigsaw puzzle game I’ve ever played. You can fail the puzzles because the pieces are in the wrong place!

Verdict: Not Recommended

eShop Page

Game received for free from the publisher!

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PuzzMix bills itself as a “A fresh, exciting music puzzle game featuring The Muse, Lola!: Its a Suika Game clone. Suika now has an online multiplayer DLC. There is also Sushi Shot, which also has an online multiplayer version. My point is there is no particular reason to play PuzzMix, unless you want 19 bad Jpop songs that are unlocked the more you play. The reason being, other than the better versions existing, is they messed up the formula. The balls have weird attachments on them so they don’t roll at all, negating the physics aspect of the puzzle genre. Even Sushi shot made the sushi move as if they balls. What this all adds up to in an extremely boring game with hyper happy music that doesn’t excite me at all

I did not even finish one game of PuzzMix because it is so ungodly boring. I didn’t want to continue. Maybe I’m just bored of the genre, maybe I should redownload Sushi Shot and play that for a few more hours. It’s not like that was just thrown out the the door, there is a sizable staff listing for the game. Work went into this:

But just because a lot of work went into PuzzMix, especially the sound design, doesn’t mean there is a game worth playing here, especially when the physics is all messed up. Suika Game and Sushi Shot both got Must Play verdicts out of me. This will get a Not Recommended with a 5 back-end score. Oh and Suika and Sushi aren’t more expensive plain(though more expensive if you want the multiplayer expansions for both). There is no reason to pick this up all.

Overall: Puzzmix is a really boring version of Suika Game, just with 19 Jpop songs and an anime heroine.

Verdict: Not Recommended

eShop Page

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Swords and Adventures bills itself as “the fast-paced, addictive RPG you’ve been looking for.” Unfortunately, it is anything but. Well, it is fast-paced, but only in the sense of how fast you’ll die. You’ll die fast because the game is all dice rolls. You see, combat is rolling either a combat die or a magic die, Then hope for the best. Combat and magic has two stats, Combat and Magic respectively, then Combat Damage and Magic Damage. One I think deals with your chance to hit. The other is how much damage you do. when you do hit Oh and magic attacks are limited by MP, which needs to refilled at a temple. But it really doesn’t matter, as you’ll still die constantly. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s start at the top with Swords and Adventures.

You have three classes to chose from in Swords and Adventures. Barbarian, Elf and Wizard. Barbarian focuses on the combat stat, Elf both, Wizard focuses on the magic stat. You then travel through one of three areas facing monsters. If you win you get gold, XP, and an artifact occasionally. If you die, your gold and artifacts are taken from you. There’s a town, with five places, The inn restores health. The temple restores MP. FIghing School raises a stat for gold. The shop sells artifacts. Finally, the square has quests for you.

The downfall of Swords and Adventures is the “combat.” There’s no explanation for how any of it works. If you enemy throws a 1, and you throw a 1, sometimes you’ll draw, sometimes you won’t. I think it has to do with the base stat, but I’m not sure. Either way, its not fun. There’s no game play here. Just roll the dice and pray. Real RPGs have stories and options to make things interesting. This game has neither. It’s a mix of frustrating and boring, not a good combination. It is therefore getting a Not Recommended with a 4 back-end score. Swords and Adventures is a complete game, but it is broken to the very core. How anyone though this is fun, is anyone’s guess. Not recommended with a four back-end score.

Overall: Swords and Adventures is a rogue-like RPG that is absolutely no fun to play at all. Skip!

Verdict: Not Recommended

eShop Page

P.S. For some reason, I feel like posting a decent game called Dark Dungeon Warrior!

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