Ultra Foodmess 2 Review

A few years ago, I got the chance to check out Ultra Foodmess on the Nintendo Switch. It was a cute and fun game in which you played as different food-themed characters, battling in a variety of mini-games. Our cutesy characters are back, once again, to compete in all-new mini-games, but now with the ability to dash. Will Ultra Foodmess 2 improve on everything from the first-party game released in 2020?

The game has local multiplayer for up to four players. If you don’t have anyone to play with, or only a couple of people, you can add bots to take up the other slots; it’s more entertaining and chaotic to have four characters facing off against each other! Each player chooses their preferred food type from the eight available options at the beginning. Once unlocked, you can play 24 different foodies, including Chedd, the cheddar cheese, and McCookie, the sandwich cookie. Fortunately, it is simple to unlock the others to add to your “menu” just by playing the game. They all have identical controls, so you can choose the one you think is the cutest.

After choosing your character, you must decide the number of rounds required to win this match. These mini-games are super short, so if you select only three, it can take as little as five and a half minutes to determine a winner. This works well when you don't have very much time to play, but when I played with my kids, we would select 10 rounds to make the food battle last longer.

Ultra Foodmess 2 has 10 different mini-games to play, though, unlike the first game in the series, they aren’t all food-related, which is actually kind of surprising as the characters are all food. You can choose from 10 different mini-games, such as Foodball, where you play soccer with a cake ball; Polar Push, where you push ice cream balls together to create a huge one complete with chocolate sauce and sprinkles; and Mashed Pit, where you smash large potatoes to make them bounce around the ring and smash into your opponents with their spikes. One of my favourite games was Call of Foodie, which is a clear homage to Call of Duty. Here, you're trying to shoot your opponents with doughnuts that you pick up around the stage; if you miss, the doughnuts will bounce around the stage until they hit someone. One of the things that I found odd is how some of these mini-games didn’t feel like they fit the food theme that the game had going on. In Dash n Splash, your goal is to force your adversaries into a river without falling in yourself. To me, this would make more sense if it were pushing characters into a pot of water on a stove to stick with the food theme. Or the Lunch-a-Libre mini-game, which is like playing hot potato with a wrestling belt and passing it to someone else before the Luchadore jumps on you. I don’t think including a pile of tortilla chips as decoration really counts as food-themed.

The game looks super cute and has interesting backgrounds that change every time you play the same game. It’s cartoony and colourful, with a large selection of kawaii food characters to play as. They each have their own unique voice — well, cackle, that is. Most of them sound creepy! Fortunately, you only hear it on the selection screen or when they are the winners of that mini-game. The music, like the visuals, is happy and upbeat, which fits Ultra Foodmess 2 very well. The mini-games that you play are quite short, so you really don’t have much time to get sick of the music.

Ultra Foodmess 2 has incredibly simplistic controls, making it straightforward for anyone to play. Move your character around with the thumbstick, and dash with the bottom face button. Every single game uses that same control scheme, so you will never have to remember other buttons at all which makes it very easy for new players to learn. You use Dash to shoot doughnuts, smash into other characters, or simply move faster to avoid obstacles. This move was not available in the original, but it is definitely handy to have now!
Each time you complete a mini-game, the winner of that round gets a stamp on their card to show how many they have won so far. Each game has a sticker representing a different country. Why is this? The game doesn't really explain it, but in the intro we see the pizza character zipping up a bag and grabbing a passport, so I guess it's to show where they have travelled. The game doesn’t tell you so I'll assume this is it. But why do you get a Kenya sticker for a game that has you pushing other characters off a raft? It would be nice if Ultra Foodmess 2 had a bit of a story, or at least some explanation for things like this, as it doesn’t make much sense the way it is now.

Ultra Foodmess 2 is an entertaining game to play with friends for short gaming periods. With only 10 mini-games to compete in, some not food-related at all, the game gets repetitive pretty fast. But if you are looking for a party game that has super simple controls, a charming aesthetic, and entertaining games to compete in that won’t take a long time to complete, Ultra Foodmess 2 will fit the bill!