SHIKA-Q

For decades, competitive puzzle games have forced us to split our attention between two different screens. We watch as both sides work, individually, to create devastating combos to make life on the other side a whole lot harder. But Shika-Q bucks tradition and mashes everything together onto one extremely chaotic board that both players are forced to share and fight over. The result is a genuinely exciting one-on-one experience that borrows well-worn ideas and uses them in a fresh new way, but is there enough content here to keep people engaged? That’s what we’re about to find out when I review Shika-Q.

The goal of the game is simple enough. You need to create boxes on a 10 x 10 grid using traditional Tetris pieces. You do this by selecting one of three pieces and then connecting it to either the red or blue tiles that are already on the board. The idea, of course, is to make the box as big as possible, connecting as many tiles together as you can before your combo time runs out. Simple, right?

Think again, because what sets this game apart is that there’s another player working to undo those boxes you’re building. This is exclusively a one-on-one battle for land and combos, with each side taking turns at the exact same time on the exact same board. In other words, it’s absolute chaos, with both sides desperately trying to flip the boxes and grow the highest combos, which in turn will take damage away from the other player. Once you’ve inflicted 200 damage (or time runs out) the game is over and it’s on to the next round. The first to win two games takes the series.

What makes this game both exciting and infuriating is how easy it is to break the other person’s combo. It’s not good enough to just make a simple square, because once you have something going a timer will pop up. You can either build onto that square or let the time run out, attacking the other player. The trick is that your opponent can easily switch the combo from your side to theirs by simply placing one strategic piece.

The good news is that you can just as quickly take that combo back, effectively boxing the other side out. You’ll quickly realize that this is as much a game about building combos as it is land management. Early on, I was playing in the moment, constantly afraid that I was behind the other player. But the more games I played (and won), the more I realized that the game is all about planning ahead and using strategy to make it hard for the other player to counter. This is one of those games where it forces you to attack and defend at the same time, leading to some truly exciting battles.

It helps that it’s easy (and fun) to get in the way of the other player. Because you’re playing together, you both can see what each other is doing, allowing you to swoop in and place a piece in the exact spot your opponent had been hovering over. I cannot tell you just how satisfying it is to swoop in and deactivate a bomb that was just a second away from causing you 20 or 30 points of damage, only to then turn around and set up an even deadlier combo to attack the other guy. This is the reason why people love competitive puzzle games.

While the concept is simple to wrap your head around, it might take a couple of games before everything clicks. I sharpened my teeth playing against the computer, and early on it felt like I was constantly behind, just scrambling to keep up with what the other side was doing. However, once I figured out what the game was asking of me, I started to look at that game board in a whole new way. Instead of catching-up, I led the charge and dominated the competition.

Unfortunately, the single-player component of Shika-Q is as bare bones as it comes. You can change the opponent’s difficulty level and a few of the game options, but this is basically just a warm-up mode. This game is centered around the online multiplayer, especially ranked matches. This is where most players will hang out, going up against people all around the world. And the good news is that this worked perfectly. Day or night, I had no problem getting matched with another player, and I never once had somebody quit on me. The matches are quick and always exciting. This is the most fun I’ve had with a competitive puzzle game since challenging friends to Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo back on the original PlayStation.

Despite offering some of the most exciting puzzle action seen in decades, Shika-Q is held back in a number of key ways. One thing we’ve already touched on – it’s barebones. There’s absolutely nothing to the single-player mode where you go up against the computer. There aren’t even different computer opponents, just a difficult you can dial up and down. When you look at the art, the characters and the locations, it’s bursting with world building and lore. And yet, absolutely none of that is found in the single-player game. About the closest you get is a challenge mode where you just keep playing until you eventually run out of health.

Speaking of the different characters and locations, there are a couple of different battle passes that will allow you to unlock all kinds of ways to customize your profile. You get the typical things, like different avatar pictures, new loading screens and unique backgrounds for the board. Those all have a purpose. What I don’t understand is what the unlockable characters do. You can’t show them off online and they never show up in the single-player modes. For all intents and purposes, your identity is that small square avatar on the screen, not some cool looking character you unlocked. Perhaps the developers have a use for these characters and this criticism will look foolish in the future, but consider me confused by a lot of the items in the battle pass.

I also wish there was a bit more to the multiplayer modes. Much like the single-player, there’s not much to the online play. You can play a casual game, a ranked game or a private game. There are no bells or whistles, just a no-frills one-on-one battle and nothing more. And when I say nothing more, I mean it. You can’t even look up your stats. There’s no leaderboard or way to compare your online wins to your friends.

To be fair, that’s one of the quality-of-life complaints that will likely be remedied in future updates. The game is filled with those little issues that might not seem like a big deal individually, but continue to add up the more you play the game. It’s a little thing like the loading screen. You’ll be able to unlock all kinds of cool looking loading screens, but you’re going to be stuck seeing the one you selected over and over until you change it. With something like that, you would ideally want the loading screens to be on some kind of rotation, but the only way that happens is if you manually change it every time. Lame.

I would like to believe that the barebones package available right now is just the beginning on a long journey where Shika-Q becomes a bigger and more fleshed out experience with something for just about everybody. The battle pass gives me hope that the developers intend to continue adding to both the various modes and the game itself. It would be fun to see different charge attacks get added or other ideas that shake up the already engaging gameplay. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll figure out something to do with all of those characters you can theoretically unlock.

As far as I’m concerned, Shika-Q is an easy game to recommend to anybody who love competitive puzzle games. With its breakneck speed and strategic gameplay, I can see this being a crossover hit, especially for those into one-on-one fighting games. Unfortunately, in its currently package, you’re not getting a lot, beyond a fun online multiplayer mode. There are hints at a bigger and more fleshed out game that could come later, but for now, this is a barebones experience through and through.