Ultra Foodmess (Switch)
When critiquing a multiplayer focused title, there are a few easy traps to fall into that don’t really help people searching for a new fun game to play with friends. Some multiplayer games are docked points if they lack a gripping single-player component, while others might be criticized for lacking depth since they’re focused on quick minigame experiences with no long term goals. It’s always nice to see a game try to broaden its appeal of course but a game like Ultra Foodmess wants the focus to be on snappy and energetic games played with a group of friends and asking it to be something else feels like it is intentionally ignoring this game’s purpose.
Ultra Foodmess is a collection of 11 minigames that take very simple concepts and turn them into frenetic little battles to come out on top. Up to four players are little food people with silly names and very expressive faces, and it’s actually pretty easy to laugh when you see a sandwich with a smiley face suddenly seething at losing a round or a little pizza slice cry as it falls behind in points. The large rectangular areas all the minigames take place are zoomed out to show all of the action so it can be a little easy to potentially mistake some of the many round food characters for each other in the chaos of the moment, but there are player specific color trails behind each character as they move to help with giving you a clear indicator of who you are no matter how hectic the action gets.
Ultra Foodmess’s batch of 11 minigames certainly sounds like it might get old quickly, but the quick switch from a completed minigame to the next one keeps things energetic. As players try to reach a certain amount of wins they’ll rapidly be thrown into minigame after minigame with just enough time to get an update on rankings in between and know what they’re being thrown into before the action kicks off once more. While the speed of certain minigames will be in the hands of the players, other have short timers to make sure things keep moving along and some make it more and more unlikely players will be able to stay alive the longer they last. Because the games come and go so quickly they never linger long enough to grow stale and ones that are less exciting aren’t going to bog things down. If anything, peppering in the less energetic ones or ones that break from some of the common formulas helps better minigames from becoming too familiar or repetitive, although you can always tinker with the minigame selection to remove any you don’t want to play.
However, the 11 minigames available are a mostly enjoyable bunch, especially the ones that fall under the broad umbrella of dodging deadly objects. The deceptively simple Chop-Chop just has all the players thrown into a large mostly empty arena, but soon saws begin to fly in from off screen, bouncing off the area’s borders so that soon you’re scrambling about to avoid a quick death. Hot Puddles instead has deadly hot sauce rain in from above, players needing to avoid the droplets and the lingering puddles as space becomes more and more limited. What The Fork has silverware dance around the screen while Organic Disposal’s enormous foodstuffs try to push you to your doom as they fly in from the right. While simply avoiding these, especially the deviously shaped foods of Organic Disposal, requires some quick reactions and a bit of forward thinking to stay in the game for a while, its Ultra Foodmess’s universal movement system that really makes these exciting.
While you’re moving you are fairly speedy but not easy to control perfectly, but on the other hand, if you stand still and start to move you’ll need a short bit to really get going. Standing around waiting for an opportunity can mean you won’t have the speed to strike, but if you’re always trying to stay in motion you might not be able to course correct and end up throwing yourself into danger instead. All of this also plays into the ability to interfere with other players, the little food characters able to bump each other pretty hard depending on their movement speed and angle of approach. If both players are dodging saws or silverware like champs, a hard ram can push them to their doom, and if you do try to avoid being bumped, you might end up getting into danger’s way as you’re left with few safe options on how to escape.
This movement system definitely plays an important role in modes like King of the Meal where you try to grab a crown and avoid contact with other players, but this one might be one of the weaker ones because it can sometimes be easy to find a safe spot or outrun people depending on the randomized arena style. Ultra Foodmess has a few possible backdrops for select minigame types. You might find yourself at a Mexican restaurant with dipping bowls and burritos as solid objects and little decorative sombreros you can push around to avoid something dangerous like the hot dog firing bazookas of Shot Dog. If you’re on a table with pushable sushi or large chocolate squares you can shove around you can hide from the deadly spinning ketchup spray at the center of Ketchin’ Up.
Butter, cakes, chopsticks, and plateware can all make solid objects that mean some random arrangements might give too much of an advantage to chase focused games, some like Pepper to Die where you eat a pepper and then need to touch someone before you burn up potentially being hard to win for someone engaging with the minigame’s idea. Thankfully, there are some ways to force players to participate like the hot pepper eventually magnetizing to the nearest player, and while you may get a game or two where the table design interferes too much, other ones it can prove an interesting complication. Dodging games can sometimes take place in busy areas, and these small obstructions can help repeat plays feel different and throw some extra variables into the mix to effect how you play that stage.
The last three minigames on offer definitely focus a lot on how you move, two of them actually always taking place on completely barren tabletops. In Nice to Meat You this feels practically necessary since every character has a heavy meatball mace attached to them that they need room to build up momentum to swing around. More than any other game this one definitely values how a player moves and chooses to strike, even Shot Dog’s bazooka fight only allowing you to fire when someone is in your line of fire. Exploding Fruits allows for players to attempt small strategies as well, every player periodically dropping bombs that eventually detonate and destroy some of the ground. As the battle rages on the time between each automatic bomb drop increases, meaning you not only need to be clear of each detonation but also need to avoid holes from previous ones, and you can try to be aggressive, cautious, or make holes to box in players. Juice It Up has players compete to cover as much of the battlefield with jam as they can, their character automatically dropping it wherever they walk but also able to grab jars that cause a small explosion of it in front of them when touched.
Many of the games have little strategies that can be cooked up that will never be so effective or reliable they’ll win the day. Stealing covered ground in Juice It Up will lower an opponent’s score, but if they grab more jars they’ll probably overcome that loss and the explosion’s shape makes it harder to easily wipe away their efforts. Pushing people around in Chop Chop or What the Fork can earn an earlier win, but any time you go towards someone they might bump you back and lead to your loss instead. Even Shot Dog is designed so that players can’t pull off the ricocheting sausage shots unless they’re looking at a foe, meaning you might be fired back upon as they look right back at you. Ultra Foodmess will still likely reward the player who can best handle movement or the unique mechanic of a specific minigame, but the random elements and shifting variables built into most of their designs means that less skilled players can and will win without it feeling unfair.
One thing to consider though are the AI bots you can add to fill in your groups. The AI actually seems to vary in effectiveness not so much game by game but based on a pattern of behavior. You don’t get to select your difficulty, but sometimes you might get a potato who really can’t grab a win to save their life while other times the Oreo seems to be ruthless. You can see little gaps in their intelligence on occasion, they like to favor corners at unsafe times and they fail to spot the holes in Exploding Fruits fairly often, but their presence is impactful and they can snatch wins because of their different approaches or how certain factors come together.
If you do want a reason to return to the game beyond just fun, there are some achievements as well that actually go towards unlocking some of the little food characters. Some of these are as simple as playing the game a certain amount of times, but others will reward you if you’re able to survive in the dodging games for a long time. Admittedly there were rounds where my attempts to earn an achievement let others capitalize and kill me, and while there are some cheap ways to earn the achievements without playing normally, many of them emerge just by continuing to play or doing exceptionally well at a minigame. Having new cartoon cuisine join the cast list is simple enough that you likely won’t push yourself to unlock them all since they’re all functionally identical, but it’s still a nice little touch that makes continued play feel a little more worthwhile.
THE VERDICT: Ultra Foodmess’s 11 minigames are all strengthened by being packaged together. Rounds go by quickly and snapping from one game to the next lets the less exciting ones give you a short but enjoyable breather between the frantic fights to survive. Dodging games in particular escalate to such a degree that merely staying in the game is an entertaining challenge, and your ability to always interfere with others by ramming into them lets things remain interactive between players. Even minigames like King of the Meal and Pepper to Die can provide quick excitement despite a few apparent flaws, and once you throw in some expressive characters and the rapid round system, it’s easy to have a blast with this fun little morsel of a game.
And so, I give Ultra Foodmess for Nintendo Switch…
A GOOD rating. With only a serving of 11 minigames, Ultra Foodmess could have very well turned out weak. However, a lot of its ideas for game presentation help its many parts avoid what seem like inevitable pitfalls. Even if a minigame in the collection isn’t so hot, it serves as a nice and quick divider between the better minigames that would threaten to lose their luster otherwise. While the dodging games are definitely the stars of the show, replaying Chop Chop over and over would definitely wear down the simple fun of the gradual escalation to an arena full of deadly saws. Instead, you get a nice spread of minigame types that all have a very simple but solid movement system at their heart that makes it so movement is easy enough that it won’t frustrate but can lead to interesting failures if players don’t handle their characters well. While the achievements give you a little more to do with the game it never overcomplicates itself, meaning you can rapidly go from round to round and always slip right into the new minigame formula. I do think some simple ideas like slightly slowing down the character with the crown in King of the Meal could enhance that minigame some and adding a few more simple but sweet ideas would definitely make this a game you stick with longer, but it’s also a game that is easy to return to or introduce new players to where lack of familiarity won’t mean they’ll be losing every round.
Ultra Foodmess has little for a single-player to do besides play against bots, and the achievements are more of an extra than something to really shoot for, so someone who isn’t judging it as a party game would definitely find it lacking. This isn’t a game catering towards people looking for something complex they can sit down and play for hours on end; Ultra Foodmess is a bite-sized minigame collection that is just as easy to return to as a delicious bag of snacks even if it won’t come close to being your favorite food. It’s always going to be a little different and moves from minigame to minigame quickly so nothing ever drags. If you want something on Switch you can pop on for a bit for some enjoyable play, Ultra Foodmess is simple, speedy, and silly, this recipe solid for making for a good appetizer before something more involved or a nice treat between longer multiplayer experiences.