Review: Pokemon Cafe Mix

I have never wanted to eat a Pokemon more than I do now

A few years ago, I wrote a review for The Pokémon Cookbook, an instructional book designed for children that teaches you how to transform your food into Pokémon. Did not go well. I did not make edible Pokemon as much as I created food so horrible that not even Andrew Zimmern would touch it. It turns out that making food art is, well, an art.

Making dishes that look like my favorite pocket monsters is certainly beyond my reach in real life, but it’s something I excel at. Pokémon Café Mix.

Pokémon Café Mix (Android, iOS [reviewed], Switch)
Developer: Genius Sonority
Publisher: The Pokémon Company
Released: June 23, 2020
MSRP: Free to play with microtransactions

There is no way to avoid that Pokémon Café Mix is one of the most attractive games available on mobile platforms. It opens with a decadent video of a Pokémon coffee from your past before leaving to start your own restaurant. Leah will help you along the way and introduce you to the riddles that stand between you and the best Pokémon coffee on the planet. Very soon, the adorable looking Pokemon will start lining up to test your products, and if you impress them enough, they will join your team and bring their special abilities along with them.

Initially, the actual puzzle mechanics behind Pokémon Café Mix It doesn’t seem that complicated. You touch a Pokemon icon and then move it around the puzzle board, linking it to matching icons while trying to get great combos. Each puzzle manifests as an order in your cafe, and there are certain requirements for successfully removing each one, such as removing a certain number from a specific Pokémon or reaching a specific score. You only have a set number of moves to complete each puzzle, and if once you tap an icon on the screen, you only have a couple of seconds before any combo you have accumulated is cleared from the board. Successfully clear a puzzle, and the Pokémon rewards you with golden acorns based on how many turns you have left.

If you ever find a puzzle that you can’t solve right away, and you will, there are special skills that can help you. Each Pokémon has a unique ability, Leah drops megaphones onto the puzzle board every now and then, and there are coffee abilities that you can use to clear entire lines of Pokémon and cheats or immediately unlock a Pokémon ability. However, it’s very intuitive, with big toes like mine, I preferred to play the game on my iPad or Switch instead of the smaller Pixel 3a. Speaking of platforms, know in advance that there is no universal login for Coffee Mix, and the mobile and Switch versions are not currently linked to each other.

The challenge in Pokémon Café Mix It comes from various menu items and cheats that the game slowly adds to the puzzle formula as you go. For the first orders, your only concern is to link as many Pokémon as you can. Very soon, the game features sugar cubes, which you can remove with a megaphone, a coffee skill, a Pokémon skill, or by removing linked Pokémon three times while touching the cube. From there, it introduces more cheats, including honey, which reappears if you don’t remove everything, ice that freezes Pokémon, and cheats instead, and most annoying of all, bubbles.

You can remove all of these tricks with a skill, megaphone, or remove linked Pokémon that touch them. However, some require a different strategy. Tomatoes, for example, should be moved to the baskets at the bottom of the puzzle screen. You can only remove the nuts from the puzzle board with megaphones or abilities. Some of the puzzles may seem daunting, but knowing how to use the puzzle formula to my advantage kept it from feeling overwhelming.

Throughout my journey through the first 100 puzzles, I’ve only had two massive obstacles in my progression. Order 64 and Order 88 took several tries and required a long wait for my hearts to refill. Are you able to play Pokémon Café Mix as long as you want while you’re winning. Every time you fail, you lose a heart, and each one takes half an hour to fill. You have five hearts to work with, but on these two puzzles, I ended up putting down my phone while doing something else to pass the time until I could tackle them again.

The tricks I can deal with, but there is one aspect of Coffee Mix That proves much more annoying the more I get into it. As stated above, satisfied customers will eventually start volunteering at your café, and each helper Pokémon has a unique ability. Charizard, for example, will remove Pokémon and cheats to the right of its ability icon. It combines two of its skill icons, which you can do for all characters, and it’s even more powerful.

Now the game will recommend which Pokémon are best suited for the puzzle challenge, even if you don’t have that Pokémon. One of the riddles I struggled with had a recommended Munchlax Pokémon. For whatever reason, I had only served Munchlax once at that point in the game and I was still missing a few visits to join my squad. Every three or more failures of this puzzle, the game would recommend that you switch to the most suitable Pokémon for this challenge, a Pokémon that you didn’t have. Fortunately, I was able to add Munchlax to my list not long after using party invitations that invite two customers to their two-course coffee. It’s an easy way to build a good relationship with the Pokémon, but it’s limited in how many times you can throw a party and who’s invited.

As this is a free game, there are microtransactions that you can buy and sporadically encourages you to do so, especially when you run out of golden acorns. You can buy these acorns at the cheapest price from 99 ¢ for 1,200 to $ 19.99 for 24,400. You can use acorns to fill hearts, swap guests at your parties, and take three extra turns in any puzzle. Just know that those extra turns start at 900 acorns and that price increases with each subsequent use in the same puzzle. There are also bundles of items available to purchase that give you acorns and coffee skills. These packages start at $ 3.99 and go up to $ 79.99, which the game considers a “good value.” Spoiler alert, but paying $ 80 for a bundle of items in a free mobile game is neither a good value nor a good idea, and frankly, it’s gross for developers to portray it as such.

Those microtransactions are easy to ignore right now, but I have a feeling that in the future, they will become much more tempting. Genius Sonority has already updated the game with new puzzles and dishes, and currently, there is a Scorbunny visiting his cafe for a limited time. As with all other Pokémon, if you impress them enough, they will join your team. But as more challenging puzzles are added, arguably getting these monkeys for a limited time will become more difficult. If your favorite is only there for a week or two, I can see how that could push players to drop real cash on fake acorns.

At this point, however, it hasn’t reached that point of player exploitation where I would recommend removing it entirely from your phone. Pokémon Café Mix He is currently at that sweet spot where he is mostly harmless with only a few bits of frustration. The puzzle formula is entertaining enough to bring me back two or three times a day to try to overcome those obstacles, but really, I’m activating the app much more often than that just to see those delicious Pokémon dishes.

_{[This review is based on a retail version of the free-to-play game.]}

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Pokemon Cafe Mix reviewed by CJ Andriessen