After witnessing the degradation of the Nintendo Switch e-shop, I have become somewhat wary of games with needlessly long titles, since that is usually a sign of low effort shovelware. In fact, if I hadn’t been offered a review code and just stumbled across Sugar Mess – Let’s Play Jolly Battle on the Meta store, I probably wouldn’t even have given it a second glance.

But don’t let the name put you off: behind that awkward title lies a game that offers quite a lot of variety and charm. It may not be perfect, but it may still be worth your time.

Many thanks to the publisher for the review code.

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SUGAR RUSH
The story of Sugar Mess – Let’s Play Jolly Battle is told through a series of pleasing pop-up book segments between each stage. The tale tells of the Sugary Prince building a kingdom with his robot friend Robbie. He was so happy with how it turned out that he built another better robot to help him expand it, leaving poor Robbie on the sidelines.

The sweetness soon starts to go sour as the candy population starts forming mobs to attack the kingdom, leaving the prince to defend the kingdom and find out the cause of it all.

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After the introductory stage, where you fend off wave after wave of sugary foes from a stationary position, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the whole game was just going to be a wave-based shooter (heck, I sure did); but the game has far more up its sleeve than you may have expected: there’s a mine-cart mounted rail shooter, a puzzle game, a rhythm game (seriously), and bosses. 

Most of the gameplay styles tend to focus around the central shooting mechanic, which works well enough. Your starting pistol is efficient, although needs constant reloading using the constantly respawning sugar balls; and power ups can be obtained to give yourself a quick health boost or a screen nuke. Doing well in levels will upgrade the efficiency of your gun, and coins earned will allow you to buy new ones. There are only three guns in total, and I’d argue that the pistol is probably the easiest to use, but they all control differently enough to justify their existence. The machine gun in particular is particularly satisfying to use, although it didn’t seem possible to reload it unless it was completely out of ammunition, which made it more of a hinderance than a help.

The shooting stages themselves work as you might expect, with an assortment of foes to take down. Enemies can either stay back and fire at you from a distance, or come flying straight at you. Their designs are a little bit lacklustre as they’re all essentially rectangular or circular shapes that don’t really seem to resemble candy, and the lack of feedback when shot makes them pretty unrewarding to take down. Clearly they’re designed to appeal to younger gamers, but I felt that they could have been so much better – especially when you consider just how detailed some of the environments look.

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What surprised me the most about the game were stages where you don’t shoot anything at all. The first kind you’ll encounter is a rudimentary puzzle game where you rotate shapes to complete a sequence, and honestly it feels a little bit like filler. I think the creators realised that it probably wasn’t very fun either, as they even allow you to skip it and move onto the next level after a mere minute or so of trying.

But this is soon followed by what are easily the best stages in the game. These rhythm levels make absolutely no sense in the context of the game and come completely out of the blue, but they’re so enjoyable that you probably won’t care all that much. Picking up a mallet with each hand, the goal is to hit the notes as they pass in time to the music. It’s really good, and the music they chose is pretty catchy too. Neither of the two rhythm stages are particularly difficult to complete, but that’s probably for the best given that the hit detection for the notes can be rather hit or miss at times. But that doesn’t stop these levels from being an absolute blast.

And of course, this wouldn’t be a shooting game if it didn’t have any bosses to take down. Rather than being bullet sponges, the bosses in Sugar Rush – Let’s Play Jolly Battle have a slight twist to taking them down. One boss has a conveyor belt that feeds him power-ups that you need to contend with, whilst the other needs to be taken apart va magnets. They can be tough at first until you realise how you need to approach them, but I found the boss designs to be pretty good when compared to the standard enemies, and had fun fighting them too.

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Even though the game seems like it has a lot of content due to the variety of level styles, you really only play two of each type. As such, you can hammer through the game in about an hour and there’s not a massive amount to help you come back. Sure, you could unlock and upgrade all the guns if you wanted to, but as the pistol can easily deal with anything the game throws at you, there’s also no real need to either. There’s also an arcade game you can play in the hub room which is a nice distraction, but it’s also clearly more of a bonus than anything substantial.

That being said though, it is worth noting that the developers seems to be very active at the moment, and are even dropping a new update soon with some extra content for the game. Of course, future support is hard to judge at the moment, but I’d say it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on if the game interests you but you’re not sure about whether to take the plunge. At the very least though, even if they don’t add anything substantial down the line, what is here is still solid enough to ensure you don’t regret your purchase.

VERDICT
Sugar Mess – Let’s Play Jolly Battle is certainly an ambitious title as it attempts to fuse a variety of gameplay styles together, and succeeds for the most part. It doesn’t quite nail any of them, but it’s at least competent enough to make it a short but sweet experience.

The publisher has also requested that we note that the game is also available on PICO, PSVR2, and Steam.