Slime Girl Smoothies (Nintendo Switch) Review

A slime girl welcomes you. You are in charge of helping this busty… thing and her friends with smoothie creation. After mixing and matching the correct ingredients, the slime girl drinks the result, and… well, shakes it inside her large, bouncy shakers, before "milking" them into a glass. Yup. It's one of those games, and as expected, the main reward isn't winning the game, but seeing the girls doing their thing, and once in a while receiving a spicy picture. What wasn't expected is that this is somewhat challenging.

Such titles usually lean towards the realm of casual gaming. Match-3, Solitaire/Mahjong, simplistic strategy titles, visual novel-esque RPGs, generic puzzlers, and so on and forth. Easy to get the grasp of, and usually not that difficult. This is a puzzle game as well, and seemingly a simple one, yet most will find it to be a bit tougher than usual. The first thing that increases the difficulty is the user interface itself. Whereas most puzzlers have clear shapes and colours, plus unobtrusive UIs, here the screen is a bit of a mess, with the worst part being the area where you do the actual puzzle-solving, as it is extremely small.

In a way, no, this isn't really that challenging, just tedious. The gameplay goes something like this. You throw "grids" of coloured shapes in the bottom of a rectangular area (a glass essentially), and when these colours touch each other they create mixes - so, if you want to create, say, the taste "Cherry," you need the black triangle mixed with the red circle. Easy-peasy? Sort of. Unlike Tetris or like-minded games, where all the necessary info is right there on the game area, here your eyes constantly go back and forth between the mixing chart in the right half of the screen and the actual mixing area. It doesn't feel natural, and as a result, it's not fun.

As the game goes on, it all becomes extremely repetitive, because it's cocktail after cocktail, with few tiny differences between them. A couple of additional mechanics get added every once in a while. The player will be able to rotate the grid before throwing it, slice it horizontally or vertically, and so on, but the core gameplay won't really change that much. In essence, you are slowly mixing and matching shapes and colours for about 15 minutes before taking a look at a naughty pic where a slime girl flashes her… equipment or does something a bit spicier with the manager, aka you. Not worth the trouble fellow pervs.