Sausage Sports Club

I like playing video games with my daughter.  Whilst it isn’t difficult to let her run around and have fun in Super Mario Odyssey, it’s much more fun if it’s something we can play together.  She hasn’t quite got the skills to actually “play” most games, but she enjoys exploring environments without having to worry too much about fighting off monsters and such.  She’ll get there I’m sure, but for now I’m very happy to play games that I can support her in or that don’t have fail states. Recently I found Sausage Sports Club on the Nintendo Switch store, and was very happy to find out it wasn’t what it sounded like…

Lights. Camera. SAUSAGE!

Sausage Sports Club is, at its heart, a collection of 5 mini games wrapped up in a silly coating.  The premise is that a bunch of ridiculously proportioned animals are on an island, competing to find who is the best!  The animals compete in football (proper football), capture the flag, sumo, coin collecting, and painting the arena.  All of these are simple to play thanks to basic controls, and work pretty much exactly how you’d expect.  Score the most goals, collect the most coins, or paint more of the stage in your colour.  Everything works with up to 8 players, using single joycons.

The paint game was the most popular.  And chaotic.

On its own, this wouldn’t be enough to make purchasing this worthwhile.  What has given me value for money here is just how silly eveything is when you consider the “sausage” aspect of the game.  All the animals have tiny bodies and insanely elongated necks, making them look like sausages with legs.  The encks are physics enabled, meaning that running forward results in your head falling behind you.  If you hold ZL, your neck flops to the ground and can be controlled further using the right stick.  Simply describing it does not do justice to how ridiculous this looks.  A puppy, a pigeon, a shark, and a flamingo sprinting around with their heads flopping about all over the floor caused more than a few fits of giggles.  Conversely, pressing ZR causes the neck to go bolt upright and causes plenty of amusement in itself (especially with the pigeon, which looks very suspicious).  The only other controls are jumping and dashing, so it’s pretty simple really.

Nom nom nom.

Beyond the games, there’s an island that can be explored at your leasure with up to seven friends again.  There’s some fun to be had here, with different building containing musical instruments and robots that chase you around (amongst other things).  There’s also a hat shop to buy accessories for your animal of choice.  Personally I was a fan of shark-with-beard most of the time.  There’s a lot of making your own fun here, but try playing it with a five-year-old when they realise they can hide their elongated puppy in a bin without laughing.

It looks pretty enough, with four different environments to play in (my favourite is Mini Tokyo), and all the animals have their own distinct look.  Plus there are all those hats!  The sound is fine, but nothing special.  I think it could have done with a greater variety of music if I had to pick out an improvement here.

I haven’t put up many pictures of the games themselves, simply because exploring the island was very funny.

The thing is, variety is kind of this game’s problem.  Whilst the island is fun to explore, there are only four arenas to play in.  The games are fun enough, but five seems like a pretty low number.  It won’t take a huge amount of time to have seen pretty much everything Sausage Sports Party has to offer, even if you haven’t unlocked everything.  For the price though (around £10), I don’t think there’s a lot to complain about.  If you’re just looking for something that a few of you can have some local fun with for an hour or so at a time, then you could probably do worse than this.  I imagine playing with 8 players (I don’t have that many joycons!) would be a lot of chaoric fun!

Obviously as gamers, we all love hats.

Sausage Sports Party was developed and published by Luckshot Games.  I played the game on Nintendo Switch and would recommend it as some very silly, if shallow, fun with kids.  It’s simple to control and will cause more that a few fits of giggles as you run around the island bashing your head into anything you can find.  Much like real life really.