A well known staple in the time-management genre Diner Dash has appeared on PSN.
Diner Dash follows the adventures of Flo, who escapes her office job and starts her own restaurant. The aim of the game is to serve a number of customers as effectively as possible in order to go further in the world of cookery.
The gameplay, as in all successful time management games, is simple but addictive. Flo must seat customers, take their orders and deliver them to the chef, bring them their food and bills and then clean the tables. The key to earning high scores and expert ratings is chaining tasks together, completing more of the same task consecutively. However, this must also be carefully balanced with keeping the customers as happy as possible, and not letting them wait too long.
Diner Dash offers several modes to the player, story mode, endless shift mode, as well as very welcome co-op and competitive multiplayer modes.
Story mode is quite deceptive, in that there isn’t much of a story, it ends up being level after level, purchasing upgrades. However, there are trophies for doing this. For each restaurant, the formula of level completion and upgrades remains the same.
On the other hand, endless shift mode offers much more enjoyment. What makes it enjoyable is that it keeps giving you more customers at an ever quickening rate until you cannot possibly cope any more.
As Flo hits certain scores, the player can choose which upgrades they want. More tables to increase seating capacity, better shoes to move faster, a nice podium to placate diners waiting to be seated, alongside other options, which do, to some extent, ensure that the game is not always the same.
Being friendless during the review period, I was unable to test the co-op and competitive multiplayer modes, although having looked online, it seems that the general consensus is that these modes are hugely enjoyable, attempting to co-ordinate restaurant service with a friend in the room.
Diner Dash has increased in graphical fidelity on its move to the console, with vibrant color and definition that adds a nice polish to the simple cartoon-styled graphics, which do the job adequately, but lack a ‘WOW’ factor.
The game design in the transition did present some issues for the gameplay. The view the developers chose to use places tables fairly close to one another visually, which can make it difficult to determine when customers have their hands raised for ordering or requesting a check, especially when it gets very busy.
The controls – vitally – are very responsive, meaning that once you’ll never find yourself somewhere other than expected, unless it is your own fault.
There is a free demo of Diner Dash to try, and so you can all have a look for yourselves. The game is priced at $9.99, and its value for money of course depends on the mileage you will get from the game. If you see yourself being drawn back to the demo consistently, then it is surely worth picking up. For fans of this genre, Diner Dash on PSN is a great example of it. For all those who are not, or have never played a game of this style, try the demo, you could be surprised.
[Rating: 3.5/5]
