Game: CatMelon – Suika Game
Genre: Suika, Puzzle
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: New Dawn Game Studio
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $2.99 | UK £2.49 | EU € 2,99
Release Date: November 4th, 2024
A review code was used, and many thanks to New Dawn Game Studio.
If you know me, you know I love Suika-type games. So, I was super excited to see a new Suika-type with a cat theme, and I had to pick it up to review it!
What is a Suika Game?
If you don’t know what a Suika game is, let me take you back a few years. There was a Chinese company that made a game where fruit is dropped onto one another. When two of the same kind of fruit touch, they merge together to make the next largest type of fruit in the chain until you reach the top (a watermelon), and merge it with another watermelon to remove the fruit from the board all together. You are trying to get as many points as possible before one of the fruits overlaps the top of the board, ending your run.
This game, called Synthetic Watermelon, went massively viral in China. A Japanese company called Aladdin X made their own version to help display the quality of their movie projectors, and called it Suika. Once again, this one went massively viral among Japanese streamers, and it crept over into the American and European markets from there. With the massive success of these types of games, we’ve seen hundreds of them pop up on Steam, like Watermelon Challenge and Bubble Dogs.
CatMelon—Suika Game is the latest in a long line of Suika games, and it has brought a lot of innovation to the space. It adds several features that make Suika even more fun to play.
The Upgrades of CatMelon – Suika Game
CatMelon – Suika Game has options to add limited-used assistance. You can shake the box three times, jumbling up all the cats inside the try and get some different fruit on top or to get identical fruit to merge together. You also get three cat baths, which you can use to delete a single cat fruit. This might seem like two little things, but it makes a huge difference in the way CatMelon – Suika Game plays over its competitors.
You also have the option to turn these two things off by playing in hard mode. There is Classic mode, which gives you the option to use assistance; no Help mode, which is the hard mode without assistance; and Speedy Cat, which drops fruit cats after a few seconds, whether you’re ready or not. Having access to these different game modes is also a great change; you can make things as challenging or easy as you would like.
The Physics of CatMelon – Suika Game
The physics of the falling fruit can make or break a Suika game, whether the fruit is a little sticky in the way the fruit slides around. My favorite Suika game was Watermelon Challenge; it has a very slippery connection between fruit that allows the board to move around even after they have mostly settled.
The movement in CatMelon is very different, but not in a bad way. There is a sort of gravity between the pieces that makes getting the fruit to pair up really easy. The action of the game feels really good, and the little cat fruits pull toward one another like little magnets.
As for issues with the physics in CatMelon – Suika Game, I did notice one little issue; sometimes, if you have a Watermelon cat and a pineapple cat (the two biggest cats) next to each other, they can squish each other and push themselves up towards the top of the bag. It can make for a rough end game, and I think all the devs need to do is to make the bag just the tiniest bit wider to fix this issue.
The Biggest Downside
CatMelon – Suika Game is fine with the exception of the sound design. Every time you combine a cat, it meows at you, which is cute for all of two seconds. The music is repetitive and grating. I think I would have rather had something a lot more chill; I ended up muting the game for the most part. It just wasn’t worth the headache of having to listen to that song on a loop for the millionth time.
Conclusion
Overall, CatMelon – Suika Game is a good Suika game. If you like the genre, I think you’ll like this one as well. It’s not as good as Suika or Watermelon Challenge, but it has its own charms. The cats are cute, the assistance is a fun addition, and the fact that it has difficulty levels at all is great. There’s accessibility here, and good physics. A good pick for any Watermelon game lover.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.
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