Veggie Samurai

When Algonquin cooks threw kernels of corn, beans, and other assorted vegetables together in a pot, succotash was born. It was an unsophisticated dish born out of necessity.

Veggie Samurai is a sort of digital succotash, combining a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Unlike the necessary culinary invention of the natives, its varied gameplay comes not out of necessity but as embellishments on a fundamentally thin base. The use of stale ingredients diminishes the quality, too, leaving a palatable but none-too-tasty concoction.

Rather than perfecting one dish, Veggie Samurai hopes to entice with five modes of play: Samurai, Harmony, Chaos, Sort, and Match.

Samurai is the main attraction, having you slice and dice vegetables as they fly up from the bottom of the screen. Bottles of poison count against your score, whereas slicing multiple vegetables and even double-slicing them (referred to as dicing) nets you points.

Harmony, Chaos, and Sort are minor variations on this setup involving time limits, added speed, and pattern recognition. None is particularly exciting, although the variety is welcome.

Match attempts to combine slicing with match-three puzzle play. It sounds awful because it is.

Little about the vegetable-slashing gameplay of Veggie Samurai is fresh or unique. As Match mode illustrates, this is a game that attempts to blend components of other more enjoyable titles into a single serving to satisfy all. It does nothing particularly well and everything at average level.

The game's one original concept - dicing - is inventive, but not particularly well-balanced. In order to allow dicing, vegetables float in the air longer than expected.

This has the effect of cluttering the screen with vegetable pieces, many of which are difficult to identify as sliced or not. Furthermore, the rigid setup forces cuts at a specific angle otherwise the dice doesn't count.

Technical quirks infrequently appear as well. The game crashed a few times and froze during play once. There's also a general sense that the game wasn't built specifically for iPhone and iPod touch: instead, it looks and feels as though it has been crammed down from its high-definition iPad release. Menu text, for example, is small.

While it looks fine and can fill a few minutes, Veggie Samurai doesn't have the sort of gameplay that completely satisfies.