Dealspwn writes: The game’s origins as a mobile phone title are all too obvious to see and the unresponsive controls make the £7.99 asking price a joke. It’s undeniably good to look at, but playing through the boring stages and getting hacked off with the basic mechanics becomes highly irritating. Looks like I’ll just have to fire up Okami again for my celestial scrawlings.
VGChartz's Adam Cartwright: "Just like Artdink, Acquire is a quirky Japanese developer with a history of experimentation and big ideas, but has unfortunately been at the mercy of low budgets throughout the years, leaving gamers with some fantastic titles that suffer from a large amount of jank. Acquire worked on Vita from its launch in Japan through to early 2017, injecting a nice level of variety to the console’s library despite some of the technical shortcomings of its titles, making the company a prime candidate for examination here."
"The shadow of Okami looms large before you’ve even started to play Sumioni: Demon Arts, with the sumi-e art style apparent right from the LiveArea. If that were all there was to it, it’d be easy to shake off the idea that Sumioni is something of a knock-off, but then there’s using a magic brush to paint platforms and set enemies ablaze.", says CalmDownTom.
GodisaGeek: "Like Dokuro, which I looked at recently, Sumioni is a game that received a full-whack retail release in Japan. It was a surprise to hear that both would be published in the UK, and was encouraging to hear of a drop in price – it is fair to say that most Western gamers would most definitely baulk at the idea of chucking forty quid at titles that are shorter than other cheaper fare available for download on this and other platforms."
