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Since the App Store opened there’s been a flurry of games added every single day. I’m sure you would all agree, many games are cheap and nasty. Now I’m not disrespecting any particular developer out there, because I know how hard it is to code these apps. But a lot are merely tech demos showing what the iPhone is capable of, without any real depth to their gameplay. Prices have been constantly falling since the store opened, can anyone remember paying £5.99 for Super Monkey Ball? I can.

Up steps Chop Sushi, I bought this game towards the end of January, and basically spent the whole of February playing it! Whenever you boot up the game it gives you the option of whether or not to enable sound, I find this a very nice touch, especially if you fancy listening to your own tunes while playing, instead of the ingame music. What immediately hits you once the game has loaded is it’s excellent presentation, menu’s are slick, colourful and well laid out.

The Game Modes consist of ‘Adventure’ ‘Quick Battle’ and ‘Challenges’. Obviously Adventure is the main quest which takes you to a variety of islands where you battle against odd looking characters. By beating them, you release them of their Demons, and they become Shop keepers who will sell you Challenges and Recipes. You use Fish as the games currency. You can either catch your own fish (at start of every island) or you can earn Fish ingame by matching three or more in a row. Challenges can be bought using Fish, and come in Easy, Medium or Hard difficulties. Challenges involve matching all the Sushi onscreen in a predetermined amount of moves.

Onto the main game then, it works by matching three or more of a kind. But the way you match the Sushi is a bit strange to get use to at first. When I first started I expected it to be along the lines of Bejeweled, merely swapping pieces around. It’s a bit tougher than that, and requires a lot more careful planning if you are to pull off combos to earn extra turns.

Take the picture above, I can line up four green blobs (Wasabi’s) by picking up the stray one and sliding my finger to the right, this sends it all the way to the end of the row, and shuffles everything else to the left. Because I made a line of four, I automatically get given another go, which is very handy! Whenever you line up three or more Wasabi it takes health power off your opponent. You win the match when your opponents health is depleted, likewise, you lose if he clears your health. The orange coloured Fugu build up your experience points, the more you collect, the higher the experience multiplier is at the end of each match. You may notice from the screenshots there are Stones mixed in with everything else. These cannot be matched, but once you run out of moves, instead of the game ending, these Stones all crack open revealing more Sushi, Fish, Fugu or Wasabi!

So why do we need the Sushi? Well, once you’ve won a couple of matches you slowly get introduced to Recipes. These consist of Boosts, Traps and Specials. If you activate a Boost ingame, it has a negative effect on your opponent. If you activate a Trap, it has a negative effect on you. You activate the Recipes by matching up Sushi in the order and amount shown on the tabs to the left of the screen. Sometimes you will find there is no other move left but to activate a Trap, and this puts you out of luck!

Graphically the game is a joy to behold, excellent artwork is backed up by great character design and nice animation. Sound wise the game is very quirky, personally I find the battle music to be very catchy and am sometimes left with it stuck in my head all night. It’s very much like the soundtrack to a Bruce Lee film!

Overall there enough lasting appeal to make this game well worth the £1.79 asking price. Compared to many games on the App Store, this is packed full of enough Levels and Challenges to keep you occupied for weeks to come. This is easily one of the best puzzlers on the iPhone, so I am awarding  it my App of the month award for February, go buy it! [iTunes Link]

If you would like to ask anything about the game that I may not have fully covered in the review, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.