Sophia’s Pizza Restaurant Review: Single Serving

With a name like Sophia’s Pizza Restaurant, you’ll probably give your knuckles a stretch in preparation for a time management fiasco. This restaurant themed game isn’t about fast clicks or grumpy customers, however. It’s about matching ingredients and upgrading furnishings …

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With a name like Sophia’s Pizza Restaurant, you’ll probably give your knuckles a stretch in preparation for a time management fiasco. This restaurant themed game isn’t about fast clicks or grumpy customers, however. It’s about matching ingredients and upgrading furnishings so a young entrepreneur can fulfill a lifelong dream of running her very own pizzeria. Mmm, pizza…

Sophia’s Pizza Restaurant blends a few mini-games in with a straightforward match-3 puzzle core. Each level drops a grid of ingredients in front of your face, everything from wedges of cheese to jalapenos, mushrooms, and tomatoes. Swap to match the ingredients in groups of three or more, allowing new pieces to fall in from the top of the screen. Certain tiles are marked on each stage, denoting a square you must make a match over in order to clear. The level ends when all the special slots have been eliminated, then it’s on to spend that cash!

Interrupting your puzzle solving bliss is the occasional hungry customer. These people don’t want very much, just a few ingredients in modest amounts. When they appear your priorities will shift from clearing special squares to finding the customer’s chosen items. Nothing makes you hustle like a busy college student demanding six pieces of basil. If you work quickly enough you’ll get a nice cash bonus, so it’s worth it to make folks happy from time to time.

Between levels you’ll burn that hard earned money buying furnishings for Sophia’s restaurant. Things like tables and signs and violin players may look like pure decoration, but they actually provide a nice bonus for the match-3 sections. Each upgrade gives you a new element to add to the puzzle mix, things like items to unleash or new pizza ingredients to match. Make it a point to buy as much as you can, as this is the best way to get the most out of this swap-friendly game.

Sophia’s Pizza Restaurant sprinkles a few other extras into the mix to provide a touch more variety. You’ll solve quick mini-games every so often, things like special match-3 levels or even brief hidden object scenes. Nothing too substantial, and nothing that radically alters the course of play. Just, you know, a diversion!

When all is said and done, Sophia’s Pizza Restaurant is a pretty basic puzzle game. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles to draw in hungry players, just straight-up match-3 gameplay with a couple of extras on the side. The challenge and complexity takes some time to get going, but if you stick with it the game will provide a surprisingly competent puzzle experience.

The good

  • Simple design without a lot of crazy gimmicks.

The bad

  • Game takes a handful of levels before it gets interesting.
  • Match-3 gameplay is very basic.
60 out of 100
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