GoGo Sushi Review – Tap your way towards Japanese restaurant supremacy

Our rating:

By: Sung Hwan Cho

Version #: 2.0

Date Released: 2011-11-18

Developer: Ozgnahc, Inc

Price: 0.99

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Japan is famous for many things—so many in fact that to enumerate them here or elsewhere, for that matter, would take ages and be ultimately futile. But for the immediate purpose of this app review, let us consider two: games and sushi. Games form a large chunk of the identity of Japan, inhabited as it is by people who live and love to play. As such it is home to a lot of pioneers of interactive gaming and, to a less important extent, it even inspired a hilarious Western game show called “I Survived a Japanese Game Show.” And then, of course, there’s sushi, which for its sheer delicacy needs no introduction (i.e., it’s really good). From the clever combination of these two elements of Japanese culture emerges a game about sushi with an interesting name: Gogo Sushi – Tap Tap Tycoon Fun Game App of Speedy Touch.

That mouthful of a name turns out to be quite self-descriptive for the app, as Gogo Sushi is indeed a “game app” that is “fun” and requires “speedy touch.” Your goal as player is to become a “tycoon” by “tap tap”-ing your way in and around your grandfather’s sushi restaurant, which is now facing stiff competition from the supermarket next door offering food at very low prices. Basically, it’s all about satisfying your hungry customers by providing them good old quality sushi.

It’s tempting to compare Gogo Sushi with the popular multi-platform restaurant management game Diner Dash. Both games are of course about fastfood service, and Gogo Sushi, like the iPhone port of Diner Dash, entails a lot of tapping. Indeed, tapping is the only gesture you need to repeatedly perform in order to play the game, which actually makes things simpler. And it’s important, for the game’s entertainment value, that game controls (or in the case of Gogo Sushi, just “control” since there’s only one) be kept as simple as possible while the game becomes more and more challenging as you move from one level to the next.

The progressive difficulty in Gogo Sushi lies mainly in ensuring that the right type of sushi is prepared and served to the customer who asks for it, whether explicitly or implicitly. An explicit order is placed by a customer when a speech bubble containing a clear image of his or her desired sushi appears above his or her head. The color of the speech bubble is also worth considering since it signifies whether the customer wants wasabi: green means wasabi should be included in the preparation, while white means the customer would rather have his or her sushi sans the condiment’s distinct hot flavor. An implicit order, on the other hand, takes the form of a speech bubble that may also be either green or white but contains a question mark instead of a certain sushi type. A customer will eat any sort of sushi you serve, but for you to accumulate more points you must be able to figure out what’s behind the question mark, that is, the customer’s favorite sushi, which you can ascertain from when the customer rewards you with hearts and a large tip upon service.

But knowing what your patrons want is just half the battle for sushi supremacy. The other half involves the process of preparing and serving food, and this is where the game is at its most challenging. There’s a (poorly translated) tutorial to brief you in the basics of running your restaurant, including a run-through of the different steps in making different types of sushi, and it somehow makes the game look so easy. Know the customer’s order, make it by tapping the appropriate ingredients, serve it by tapping the customer, done. Wrong! If that’s all there is to the game, then it’s really not worth your dime, is it? Fortunately, Gogo Sushi offers hours of gameplay that requires you to easily attend to one or two customers in the first few levels but later on dares you to speedily serve quite a number of customers with both explicit and implicit orders. Business expansion is crucial, so you must also be able to buy more ingredients from the fish market as well as use the conveyor belts to carry plates of sushi that you’ve prepared in anticipation of the many customers’ orders.

Aside from games and sushi, another thing the Japanese are famous for is their knack for energetic music and animation. Gogo Sushi is also indicative of this. The app features graphics and character design that are reminiscent of old-fashioned comic anime, as well as sounds that are quirky and amusing, although fairly dispensable as far as gameplay is concerned. These alongside the familiar yet rewarding demands of virtual restaurant management ultimately make for a winning “game app” recipe.