Have you ever played a fighting game and wondered how someone could take repeated slashes, stabs, fireballs, harpoons, dozens of punches and/or even bullets without slowing down or dying? Me too! In a world where health bars and timers with 99 seconds determine a winner, some fighting games – like Slice, Dice & Rice – are instead going the more realistic route. Inspired by Bushido Blade, Slice, Dice & Rice is a simplified, fast paced fighter that requires only four buttons and the directional pad to do battle and where every attack could potentially kill your opponent. Gone are the health bars, the special meters and the timer, and instead your focus can be entirely on your foe and how to take them out. Each match ends when one person – AI or human – has 4 points. It’s as simple as that!
As mentioned, the game uses four face buttons in addition to directions. The default controls allow you to quickly parry an attack, attack horizontally, attack vertically and do a “heavy attack”. As you’d expect, a heavy attack is a much slower, more powerful attack that (in my experience) can’t be blocked and will absolutely kill anyone if it hits them. You usually even get a satisfying sound effect if you pull it off (or die miserably from one) and the screen splatters with blood! These moves can easily be swapped around the face buttons, but I enjoyed the way they were originally mapped myself. As for mobility, tapping twice quickly to the right or left dashes, allowing you to dodge heavy attacks or quickly close a gap, and pressing up jumps. There are NO fireballs, no crazy uppercuts and no special moves to memorize whatsoever, but despite that the eight playable characters feel very unique. The only “special” thing you’ll ever have in the game is Unagi which will automatically slow time the next time your enemy’s attack could potentially kill you. When used, you’ll have a few seconds before it comes back, so a good flurry of attacks will leave you without it and having to rely on your quick reflexes.
The characters each have their own weapon of choice (aside from one, a tough fighter who uses his bare fists!), and each weapon has a different weight, speed and amount of damage they do. While most hits kill most people in one hit, some of the tougher, slower fighters always seem to take two hits or more. Others, like the aforementioned fist fighter, always seem to require two or more hits to take any enemy out, but he moves so fast that a quick, fatal combo isn’t difficult to pull off. If a hit doesn’t kill a foe, it will slow them down or even prevent them from jumping, so you should never feel truly cheated if you don’t take someone out with the first hit because the advantage is very clear for the rest of the fight.
The game is incredibly fast paced, and after only a few hours of play I already can’t count on both hands how many rounds took less than 5 seconds. By that same measure, two hands aren’t enough to count how many rounds took a good 20-30 seconds or even more that were full of jumping, parrying, dashing, countering, weakening a foe and either losing or winning after an incredibly tense point. Slice, Dice & Rice is the fighting game equivalent of tennis, where every slash, every dash and perfect timing are the key to victory.
Or, well, that’s USUALLY true. In my experience playing against my gal, she still managed to best me a few times merely by button mashing. This wasn’t always the case, and it heavily depended on which characters we chose, but it’s kind of nice knowing that even in a precise, quick game like this randomly pressing buttons nonstop can win a match. Despite this, the game not only puts an emphasis on strategy, it puts an emphasis on mixing up your strategy. For example, when I played the campaign one of my favorite moves was to jump in and slash horizontally at the enemy. However, there was one enemy, a girl with a giant sword (seriously, the sword is so huge she DRAGS it), and she ALWAYS swung that sword at me at just the right time and sliced me in half. Every. Single. Time! Playing close-quarters makes quick work of her though, as she takes so long to swing and her attacks are a little easier to predict so parrying is easier. Also, you can cancel out of any type of attack part way through, so you can start an attack, let them try to get a quick hit in, parry it and counter!
The game’s graphics are easily one of the coolest parts about the game. It plays with color and shades of grey in a gorgeous, comic book-ish way, and yet still feels very alive and real. The game has the perfect amount of gore, with enemies bleeding from hits and kills and heavy attacks rewarding a player with particularly brutal deaths like decapitation, reminiscent of fatalities from the Mortal Kombat series minus the button sequence. The sound is great too, at least at first – the music is perfectly fitting and feels like being in a Japanese movie, and sounds (especially that girl with the giant sword dragging it across the ground) are crisp and solid. There isn’t a great deal of variation in the background music, especially if you’re fighting the same foe over and over. Luckily you can easily mute either the sound effects, the music or both in the menu if any of it bothers you.
All of this makes for a really great, solid foundation for a game. With that being said, even after a few hours of playing, I am NOT good at it. I played through the campaign 1.5 times and found a few enemies that I had to fight 3-10 times each before finally taking them down, and this was on easy mode! There are medium and hard modes as well, and I’m assuming other human opponents could potentially be far more skilled than any of the AI. I say “assuming” because one of the biggest flaws about Slice, Dice & Rice is the difficulty finding an opponent online – after several attempts I’ve never once matched up with anyone. The attempt process is VERY quick and it’ll tell you in a second or two that it failed. This may also be part of what made it so difficult finding an opponent – typically a game will search for an opponent for a while before giving up, whereas Slice, Dice & Rice gives up immediately. This means you have to sit there and keep pressing the button to search instead of hitting it once and perusing Twitter, reading a book or whatever else you want to do while waiting. You can create a room, which likely works great for matching up against friends, but I wasn’t able to test any of this.
The campaign mode is a bit of a disappointment too. While online has all eight fighters unlocked from the second you download the game and fighting against either a human or AI opponent has all eight unlocked as well, campaign begins with only one character available. You don’t unlock the second character until you complete the first (fighting what seemed like all of the eight selectable characters with a variation on your own so you aren’t twins). Then you’re forced to take the second character through, and so on (presumably) until all eight are unlocked. Even on easy difficulty I wasn’t able to complete the second character since he’s a much closer ranged character than the first and I just never got the hang of him, meaning sadly I could never, ever progress without either a lot of determination or a lot of luck (or both, since the campaign mode doesn’t save your progress). I hate reviewing a game without completing as much in the game as possible, but I ended up giving up after failing to the same opponent over a dozen times and never getting more than two out of my four required points to win the round. On the bright side, the only reward for completing campaign mode seems to be unlocking two additional characters, each of whom are variations on one of the original eight, so unlike other games you certainly aren’t forced to play it.
I was a bit nervous about this one when I first dove in, and when we started playing it was a lot of fun, even if it was a little confusing. There’s no tutorial, and you’re only shown the controls once; from there it’s a matter of pressing buttons and seeing what happens if you want to dive in. There IS a Hints section that shows you advice via text that you can scroll through, and these hints did come in very handy, but it felt a little dull reading the hints rather than seeing them in action (even if it was text over an animation of two AI parrying, jump attacking, etc. instead of just text). Despite the game being tense, quick and one that will surely have your palms sweaty, the incredible difficulty playing against random online foes and forced progression through the campaign mode make it hard to find the fun. But if you have other friends with the game and can play it against them, or if you have other folks locally who love fighting games, I can certainly suggest diving in and slicing, dicing and ricing them repeatedly!
Finally, when I went to play again, get some additional screenshots and verify some information for this review the game would NOT let me play! It crashed every time I tried to get to the main menu, and this continued even after deleting the game and reinstalling it. There was no update and I couldn’t figure out anything to fix the issue. If I had purchased the game I would be rather upset at being unable to play when I feel like it, although for the sake of full disclosure I also didn’t give the developer or publisher a chance to fix the issue.
Note: I received a free copy of this game in exchange for my honest opinion.