Your Only Move Is Hustle - or YOMI Hustle, as the cool kids are calling it - is a $5 turn-based fighting game with stick figures that's quickly proven to be one of the biggest Steam hits of the year so far.
In YOMI Hustle, you take control of a stick figure on a 2D plane. The game starts paused, and you can select from a number of moves, all of which correspond to the mechanics of a fighting game - attacks, blocks, super moves, jumps, dashes, and the like. The action then moves forward as the move you've selected plays out, and then the game pauses again to let you pick your next move. Meanwhile, your opponent is making the exact same sorts of choices, trying to choose the moves that'll counter your own.
Imagine a version of Street Fighter where the game pauses to await your inputs, and you've got the basic idea. YOMI Hustle is all about the strategy of fighting games without requiring the same level of split-second button-pressing skill, so you get all the fun of the mind games without having to execute fireball motions on an instant's notice. There's a replay function that'll show how the fights would play out in real time, and the results are extremely - extremely - anime.
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YOMI Hustle is the first Steam release for indie developer Ivy Sly, and since its launch at a $5 price tag on February 2, it's quickly found an audience. There are a few thousand concurrent players at any given time, and while that's far from Steam's upper echelon, it's more than enough for a healthy community.
More importantly, those players love the game. The 2,400 (current) user reviews average out to an 'overwhelmingly positive' rating with 96% positive responses on Steam, and according to the third-party tracking site Steam 250, that makes it the 8th best-rated game on the platform this year. Clearly, this whole 'turn-based fighting game' idea has legs. Tiny, stick-like legs.
I think I'm ready for more crossover between the best fighting games and the best strategy games.
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