Sushi Chain

Michael (Admin) | Nov 4, 2009 Games

User rating:

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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The “time management” genre of games doesn’t sound all that sexy, but these games can be surprisingly fun. Sally’s Spa is great, and Sushi Chain is kind of similar but it’s obviously in a much different setting.

Sushi Chain has you running a sushi bar where customers are really short on patience and the further you get the more kinds of sushi you have to make. Unlike Sally’s Spa you’re not sprinting from station to station; instead, the challenge here is being able to remember all the recipes for the growing number of sushi dishes you have to prepare, and you also have to keep yourself stocked with all the ingredients such as seaweed (nori), octopus (tako), rice, salmon, and roe.

There’s a recipe book you can refer to when you forget what you’re supposed to make, and you also have a phone for calling in orders for more supplies. To make sushi, you just tap once for each unit of each ingredient… Roe Maki, for example, takes (1) nori, (1) rice, and (2) roe, so you tap the nori and rice once each and then double-tap the roe. When your ingredients are in place, just tap the area where your stuff is arranged and it gets rolled up and tossed onto the conveyor belt.

One of the things that makes this game hard is that once you tap an item you can’t un-tap it. In other words, if you screw up and wind up with an ingredient combo that isn’t in the recipe book, you just have to send it out anyway and those ingredients go to waste.

Another bummer is that you can’t remove items from the conveyor belt. Your sushi disasters will eventually disappear on their own, but if you make a bunch of items that people aren’t ordering then you’re completely screwed because the conveyor belt can only hold so many plates! At this point, you just have to hope that someone comes in and takes something you’ve already made.

Sushi Chain is a pretty fun game and things can really out of control when your customers start ordering a lot of big, expensive sushi that demands a lot of ingredients. The part of the game that’s not fun, however, is when it just completely freaks out and people start cycling in and out of the restaurant at a ridiculous pace. This is definitely a bug and it’s happened to me a couple of times. Restarting the game cured the problem, but it’s still a problem.

Another issue that TouchTen.com needs to address is memory. Sometimes Sushi Chain won’t start up unless you restart your iPhone, and I’m guessing the freak-out is also related to a hidden memory problem. Some users have also posted comments in the App Store that refer to a problem with Level 11 crashing; I wouldn’t know about this because I’ve only made it to Level 8, but I believe them.

When you’re playing and the game’s behaving, though, it’s great. As you progress through the levels you start serving sushi in different locations which all call for new recipes. Keeping up with the demand for ingredients gets to be really tough and you’ll be tapping all over the place to try and keep up, and when you forget how to make a certain type of sushi you’ll quietly flip out as you refer to the recipe book for guidance.

As for improvements, I’d really like it if the buttons in the game would make some kind of sound when you tap them. It’s very easy to mess up when you’re not sure if you tapped on something or not! I’d also like the ability to take plates off the conveyor belt, even if there’s some kind of penalty that gets imposed for doing so.

If you like this kind of game, I’d suggest trying the Lite version first and that’s mainly because of the technical problems. Sushi Chain has the feel of a high-quality game and it would definitely qualify in that category if the problems get fixed.

iTunes Link – Sushi Chain
Version 1.0
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.1.2