This might be one of my harsher reviews so i apologise in advance if this comes off as brash in any way, so that said, here goes...
Game soup is a game that plays on the microgame genre, similar to all the warioware titles, you do a short minigame move to the next until the boss, pretty simple!
The gameplay as just explained is quick short microgames progressively getting faster through the stage which are pretty decently fun, some are cheeky imitations of other games and none of them are inherently bad, but some are just kinda eh and don't really work well, these are: space invanders, marriage, failsafe, undertale evade, block, kung fu, helmet selection and pvz spit. all these suffer from one issue, on higher speeds they become impossible if you're unlucky and ultimately it ends up feeling overly cheap and annoying. Alongside this is the gamemodes, which starts with normal, then fast food, then faster food, and finally unethical, i wanted to do them all and they don't ever get the balance right, the first three are boringly easy and the last one unethical is cheap and annoyingly fast, it doesn't help the boss minigame first starts off with an rng dependent segment and with bad rng you lose hearts which you best hope you have from the previous 24 microgames, and then the final boss is randomly harder than most of the game, it just feels terribly unbalanced. I think to remedy this, some of the faster/longer minigames need extra time on the clock or play them at a slower speed even if it is later on in the run. Also i was pretty bummed to see there's no variety in the stages, you just do the same ramen stand 4 times and that's it, it misses all the charm warioware had with its cast and fun goofy world it has going on.
The graphics are alright, you can tell what game is supposed to be what, but i felt some of the anime styled faces look a bit off, i think generally the game should've gone for a more pixel style since all the pixel work they did seemed nice and looked fine, but generally the graphics are alright, even if i feel its style isn't the best, also worth noting here, the text which displays what to do for each minigame fades out and blocks some of the view, not too noteworthy but in the undertale minigame it can be impossible to see what to dodge, so i have to mark it down here.
The music is where this game fails completely, honestly with good music this game could've squeezed a positive review from me, but the games music is far too tame and isn't bold enough for what it aims to be, warioware smooth moves is a great game for comparison, go listen to all the minigame jingles and see how it varies from insane guitar riffs to funky future sounding music, not only that but the random sound effects, sounds of the timers ticking down, all add to the charming atmosphere those games have, game soup does not do that, its overly quiet, minimal with the music, and frankly the minigame jingles are laughably dull and boring, so much so that i ended up just slapping warioware ost over it instead because it was genuinely beginning to irk me that much, this game definitely needed to be more confident and heavier with its music, it felt too shallow and as a result detracted from the game.
Overall a decent try at making a warioware-like game but due to unrefined style and lack of solidarity in what gives those games a sense of style, game soup failed to live up to the expectations i had for a microgame styled game, with more refined sense of graphics, some characters of its own to add variety on stages and much much better music, i'd be leaving a positive review.
