7.3 hours played
Written 6 years ago
[h1]"I'm a theoretical person who never heard of a Diner Dash game - what are they all about?"[/h1]
Customers enter your store / diner / movie studio / torture dungeon. They want to be measured for a suit, pick up a bottle of perfume, have a steak dinner to go or have all their nails torn out. Unfortunately, all the products are scattered across the poorly designed store, and some have to prepared (steak cooked, dress made on the spot, pincers heated) before they are ready.
The longer the costumers wait, the less points you get for eventually servicing them, until they finally escape your dungeon after running out of patience. You get bonuses for serving people quickly, but also for giving them all the products they asked for at once, serving several people in a row without picking up more products, etc. So you have to plan your route on the fly to make the most points and ace each level.
Each level also has a special condition of some sort that will provide a bonus - catch all the mice, ignore any customer asking for a red item, shoot every tax collector that walks in within 10 seconds. You generally don't actually need to complete every level with full marks to continue on to the next one, but if you don't, then you won't exactly find much of a challenge.
It's a remarkably flexible genre, allowing the protagonist to do everything from running a family restaurant (in a different setting every 10 levels, just to keep things fresh) to conquering the high fashion world (while also serving food during some stages, for some reason) to being a doctor (also changing specializations every ten levels. After all, the only difference between urine analysis and open heart surgery is the exact flavor of minigame involved).
At the start and end of every level you get a bit of ongoing story - help your grandpa recover from his amnesia, romance the hospital administrator and help him kick his pill habit, catch the serial killer, and find a home for all those adorable puppies you just helped bring into the world.
[h1]Ok, so what's the difference between one DD clone and another?[/h1]
Mostly iterative differences in terms of mechanics and game optimization, as well how stupid / crazy / good the story gets.
It's insane just how much a minor improvement in terms of speed makes the game that much more addictive and accessible. I really loved Delicious Emily: Message in a Bottle, for being the first Diner Dash clone I really played, and having a properly insane story. But trying to replay it now, this really simple former mobile game takes like 20 seconds just to launch. By contrast, I can access actual gameplay in Angela's True Colors in 5 seconds or so.
Same deal with (say) customer waiting time or how long it takes you to prepare items. Customers in Message in a Bottle can crowd the counter for 10 to 15 seconds before they actually make a decision. By contrast, customers in True Colors take exactly 2-3 seconds to ask for a product. Simple changes that greatly improve player convenience and how addictive the game experience is. Been a while since I really felt the "just another 2-3 levels - just another store upgrade and a bit of story - oh whoops, I've been at it for hours" level of interest.
Gamehouse games have some very deep lore and an extensive multiverse with between-games continuity. Emily runs a restaurant in a small mid-western town, but constantly finds reasons to run other food places around the world. Her sister Angela re-conquers the fashion world in New York every game anew (and find a reason to go back to said mid-western town once per game). There's the town doctor, the town vet, the local hair salon, the burgeoning mid-west movie scene, all of which have their own game series. I'm not entirely sure how the homicide detectives and the Love Boat crew are connected, though I would have really appreciated it if the evil rival fashion designer ended up carted away as a result of (checks the Gamehouse catalog...) Parker and Lane's CSI skills.
As you can imagine, the story is unironically great, in that whole "it takes a village to get one fashion designer to the top... again... for the whatever time". It even deals with my minor annoyances from previous Angela games - you don't spend half the game serving food for some reason, and the customers are actually a supportive presence. Seriously - previous gamehouse games had the customers in a family-restaurant be a necessary evil at best and a huge annoyance at worst, so I appreciate the change.
Anyways. Quick to launch, good difficulty balance, neat storyline. Recommended.
