GoNintendo 'End of Day' thoughts - D3stiny_Sm4sher Reviews Grill-Off! With Ultra Hand!

My dear lord, this moving stuff is killing me! Up and down stairs, over and over again. My hat is off to those that are professional movers. You’ve earned every dollar and muscle you’ve acquired! Let’s just hope that all this shifting is helping me to get in better shape…if only slightly. I’m heading off to bed, and hopefully some sleep will recharge me for a new work week. See you all in a few, short hours! - RMC

Hello yello. This week we’ve got a bit of a shorter review since I had a hitch with my GameFly. It’s an exclusive game to Club Nintendo members, but if you follow this site, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be a Club Nintendo member, since you get free stuff for registering your products. I’ve got a bunch of Coins bumming around and haven’t had much to do with them, so I figured why not spend some for a free game? Turns out, this game is fairly addicting, so I figured I’d bring some attention to it. Stay tuned for WarioWare: DIY next week, which I’ve already played for a couple of hours. Also, if you enjoyed my review of Brent’s album a while back, check out my interview with him!

-Let’s Grill-Off!-
Time played: About 3 Hours
Obtained: Purchased for 80 Club Nintendo Coins
Notes: Mostly played Single Player, also played some multiplayer.
High Score: 1143475, High Combo: 193

-Fast Food to the Extreme-
When I first heard of Grill-Off With Ultra Hand, I wrote it off as some cheap little throwaway game without much to it. I actually thought it was more of a cooking sim or something more akin to Cooking Mama. Turns out that I was dead-wrong. Grill-Off is actually an action and reflex-based arcade-style game that is surprisingly addictive and challenging.

The concept is that you’re cooking meat on a set of grills, fast-food style, using…some kind of extendo-hand or something. That part I don’t quite get, but it’s there to create the main gameplay motion of having to grip the Wiimote and Nunchuk like handles, squeezing them together and pulling them apart to reach out the hand and bring it back in. You press the A button to grab onto meat and let it go when you’ve reeled the meat in to drop it on a plate. The Z or B buttons will turn up the heat on the grills, speeding up the time it takes them to cook.

What makes things complex and interesting here is that you don’t just grab meat as it falls onto the grills — you’re supposed to wait until it’s “just right” and grab it within a small timeframe while it’s perfectly cooked. Doing so multiple times in a row builds up a combo. This is easy at first, but after a few minutes things get very crazy and you’ve got all types of different meat falling in quick succession, each type of meat taking different amounts of time to cook. It becomes a great test of split-secon foresight and reflexes as you try to grab every piece of meat as it’s perfectly cooked in order. Drop a piece of meat or let one burn and it’s Game Over. It’s simple but effective, and addtictive arcade-styled games like this have a perfect home on the DLC front — especially if they’re free.

The game doesn’t have too much in the way of presentation, but what’s there is fun. The graphics are crisp, the meats are very easy to distinguish from one another, and bulge and shift color when they’re well-done, which helps facilitate the gameplay. It’s got a bizarre title theme and punchy sound effects to help provide feedback. As a matter of fact, I would leave the remote volume turned up to help me stay in rhythm with the game while I had music or a podcast playing in the background, and I found it to be a nice experience to compliment listening to something, since the gameplay doesn’t interfere with your trains of thought required to comprehend speech. Playing multiplayer was a blast, though the only person I got to play with couldn’t offer a challenge since I had more time with the game and in general more experience with gaming, but if you got two competitive gamers together on this I’m sure it would be intense.

Speaking of intense, it really does pick up after a few minutes. The game will usually last around 5 minutes or so, so it’s ideal for quick bursts of play when you’ve got 5 minutes to spare or raid succession play to burn time. It’s a shame there’s no kinds of leaderboards or way to compare scores with friends, since that would help motivate people to replay for higher scores.

It’s a very simple concept and is really a minigame more than anything, but that’s really what most arcade-styled games are, ultimately. It’s great for some quick pick-up-and-play action and gets surprisingly complex for what a simple concept it is. Not to mention you can even crank up the heat on the grills to speed things up to add to strategic timing, but if you want to be masochistic you can try to keep the heat on the whole game in a mad endurance and see how far you can get.

-Hard to Argue with Free-
I won’t score Grill-Off because part of my scoring is based on how I feel the game is worth compared to others of the same platform and price, but Grill-Off is a game that is free to download in terms of real money. When you look at it in terms of Coins, it’s a free DLC game you can get with a Wii game and a DS game. And that’s not so bad. It’s simple but very effective in the limited scope it focuses on. If you’ve been finding the Club Nintendo rewards to be lacking in anything you find interesting, give this a shot. You don’t really have much to lose and if fast-paced reflex action is your thing, you’re bound to have some fun with this little title.