A simulation game by Kairosoft, this time with the theme of a sushi restaurant. If you've played any of Kairosoft's games before, then you will feel right at home with The Sushi Spinnery. All the mechanics remain extremely familiar and there are no major additions or changes compared to previous games. In the game, you are the owner of a sushi restaurant. Your aim? To try and make it the best sushi restaurant that it can be (you get ranked out of five stars at the end of every year). Initially, you can only add some simple decorations and the conveyor belts. You only have basic ingredients to make the simple kinds of sushi.
As you progress, you will start to research more ingredients and develop new kinds of sushi by combining various ingredients together. This is the core of the game and the way it sucks you in. You're constantly given the promise of more things to uncover, more things to research and add, whether it ingredients, chefs, decoration items or restaurant expansions, there's always something around the corner. To spice things up a bit, there are contests which you enter with your chosen sushi. You must choose the right kind of sushi that aligns with the judge's demographics. Once you build up a variety of sushi and have an experienced chef, the contests will become mush easier. Your customers are also a significant factor. The higher your population value, the more customers you will have at any given time.
You will also need to regularly research new demographics (which level up as they eat your sushi), these can be quite funny as demographics range from pilots to bookworms to sumo wrestlers. Developing new kinds of sushi is easy, you just select the ingredients and the results will be based upon your chef's stats. You can also use items to boost the attributes of each kind of ingredient (color, aroma, taste etc) which adds some strategy. With all these things to do, of course the game has to have a few restrictions. There are two kinds of currency, the first is your normal $, which are spent on normal things like constructing objects and advertising. The other currency are "sushi coins" which is slower to accumulate and used for researching new products and items.
Needless to say, it can take a while initially as it takes so long to earn these coins but as your restaurant becomes bigger, it gets much easier. It's all a matter of patience. That's really about it, it feels somewhat disappointing that there wasn't any special unique game play element that sets Sushi Spinnery apart. It seems that Kairosoft played it safe and luckily, the draw of owning your own sushi restaurant is enough to support the whole game. Since your restaurant will end up getting quite big, it's good that the camera isn't fixed. You can maneuver it around, zoom in and zoom up. The graphics are your standard 16 bit pixels which still carry their charm and are perfect for a game such as this one.
I found the music to be forgettable, it's better to play the game with your own music (there are game options which allows you to turn the sounds and music off). The game is heavily menu based and you can either just use the touchscreen to tap the menu items or if you have a smaller sized phone, you can pull up a D-pad which I found much more useful (you don't have to move your fingers as much), even if it cuts a significant amount of the screen. The game "ends" in the 16th year, which feels shorter than normal. Once it ends you will get a high score. Certain elements such as experience will carry over into a new game, but the best feature is that you can now make in-game speed much faster, allowing you to see the characters speed around in fast forward.
Overall, The Sushi Spinnery is another addictive game from Kairosoft. The original price when it came out was around $5 and was a tad bit expensive, however, it's now at half the price and if you know where to look, you might even get it free from time to time (legitimately, such as from the Amazon Appstore). This is highly recommended as the idea of owning your own conveyor belt sushi restaurant is a novel idea and is executed perfectly here. Seriously, Kairosoft are the masters of making simulation games that are simple to pick up and play yet still have deep enough mechanics to make it worthwhile.
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For other Kairosoft game reviews, have a look at this page.