Kuma Sushi Bar Review: Food Made By Cute Animals

I've always loved cooking. Ever since I was young, making food has been such a joy to do whenever I'm around family, by myself, or looking to try out new recipes. And with so many kinds of food out there to indulge in, it's impossible for me to pin down my favorites. Luckily for a food-lover like me that also loves gaming, the cooking game sub-genre blends these two passions to great effect. For the past few days, I've been obsessed with Kuma Sushi Bar, an adorable and fun cooking game.

Kuma Sushi Bar is a casual cooking title with two core mechanics: making food for customers, and customizing the interior of the restaurant by repairing areas and purchasing furniture. It highlights traditional Japanese cuisine like sushi, nigiri, and sashimi, and it features authentically Japanese-themed art, fashion, and animals as interactable characters. With such a cute soundtrack, and an aesthetically pleasing pixel art style, Kuma Sushi Bar is a good game that's kept me playing for hours without end.

Image Credited to Kuma Sushi Bar | HyperBeard

The goal of Kuma Sushi Bar is relatively straightforward: make Japanese food and grow your business. At first, you'll meet an adorable bear named Kumaki, which is also the sushi chef that you'll be playing as in Kuma Sushi Bar. Then you'll learn how to make different types of food. To satisfy your customers, you'll need to assemble ingredients, then cook them, and serve the finished product to the customer.

Image Credited to Kuma Sushi Bar | HyperBeard

After serving all the customers in the bar, you'll need to attract more of them to keep business flowing. There are thirty different types of customers, all uniquely created and represented by different animals. You'll need to press a little flier paper icon at the bottom right of the screen that loads up and sends characters in after fifteen taps to get more customers. Satisfied customers will leave gold or cash. The game's introduction was clear enough and didn't leave me questioning the mechanics. I was immediately charmed by the cute design of the characters filling up the restaurant. Although I disliked how much tapping I needed to do to have a complete restaurant of customers every time, it was slightly bearable. The tapping definitely gets a little less full-on as new employees I hire have automatic abilities occurring throughout service. There’s no upgrade or detail tab for these abilities, but they do periodically clean, cook, and serve customers without interruption.

Image Credited to Kuma Sushi Bar | HyperBeard

As I sent out more orders, I opened up the first dialogue with the newest waiter applicant for my business, a cat named Nyanko. After more progress, I was able to hire more employees, such as the waiter Kitsu, the waitress Sagi, the handmaid Chyutan, and the kitchen assistant Kumo.

The growing staff of Kuma Sushi Bar interact with the restaurant in different ways and possess unique abilities that can be activated periodically. For example, the waitresses and kitchen assistant serves customers instantly, while Sagi brings new customers into the restaurant. Again, I can't express how adorable the character design was for each employee. Beyond how these new hires made playing the game smoother by automating some of the more annoying tasks, I couldn't get enough of their personalities.

Later in the game, I met new NPCs who sold me fresh produce, meats, and fish to spice up my menu. These additions helped change up the gameplay, requiring me to learn new recipes as I gained access to new ingredients. Other merchant NPCs provided new clothing for my staff, furniture to place in the restaurant, and styles for staff compartments. I enjoyed how each NPC brought something refreshing to the game every visit. It kept things moving, with always something new around the corner to learn and play with.

Image Credited to Kuma Sushi Bar | HyperBeard

As soon as I finished Kuma Sushi Bar’s tutorial, I was able to repair the bar and customize the restaurant. Throughout your progression, you're able to repair tables, walls, etc., then customize the interior by purchasing new items in the mini-shop for gold and setting them in the bar. Repairing one area takes twenty minutes as a set duration and you can only repair three things at once in the restaurant, while customizing furniture is an instant process. Sadly, the placement of items in the restaurant is fixed, and the only thing I was able to do was customize the style of the tables, ornaments, and other features. There weren't any mechanical benefits to remodeling besides the restaurant looking more attractive. Despite the lack of functional value, I was pretty fond of how this feature let me express my creativity within the restaurant. It allowed me to put together a truly authentic Japanese sushi bar by the time I had finished playing.

Image Credited to Kuma Sushi Bar | HyperBeard

That end didn’t come particularly quickly, however; Kuma Sushi Bar can be a seriously time-consuming game. I found myself regularly pushing against the limit of how many customers I could have in the restaurant at one time, and then I’d have to wait twenty minutes for the flyer to regenerate. Even the main sushi chef is time-gated in his ability to make food. This mechanic dragged the game out way too slowly and made playing more of a stop-wait-go experience.

The only actual way to speed up the process is to watch ads—and although I don't mind ads in games, Kuma Sushi Bar really pushed them on me. Even when I only wanted to play for half an hour, I felt like I had to watch many ads to keep playing. Despite so, I found it somewhat bearable. Again, watching ads was a choice, even though the benefit of not waiting a long time was excellent, I always had the option to continue playing and if I reached a timeout, I’d come back later. This experience isn’t something that I’d enjoy alone, but charmed by such cute characters, soundtracks, and a lively sushi restaurant, I was more than happy just to take my time to enjoy the game.

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Cooking Mama. It's hard not to play the animal-filled title with such an old classic, being similar to Kuma Sushi Bar. If you enjoy the entire Cooking Mama franchise, then you'll absolutely adore Kuma Sushi Bar.

• Japanese food. If you love tuna sashimi, or halibut nigiri like I do, then you'll enjoy Kuma Sushi Bar the same way. It features the same Japanese cuisine from the real world, but gamified.