Diner Dash shows you what it’s like to make minimum wage busing tables in a restaurant, but the only difference here is that you own the place. This means that every customer that comes in is money in your pocket; there is no room for error. You take on the roll of Flo, a woman who is sick of her career and decides to make a life-changing decision to open her very own restaurant. You begin with a place no bigger than a shack, and with little as four tables to work with, the situation becomes hairy real fast as the customers start backing up. You will have to learn how to manage yourself if you want to satisfy all of your customers without losing any.
Starting your restaurant seems hard at first, but once you begin expanding, the fun really begins. Not only do you have more tables, but your customers even double in size. It’s not uncommon to find yourself seating a party of six at one table, having a line that leads to the entrance, and having five other tables that haven’t been bused yet. It feels like everything has gone to the dogs at this point, and when this happens, you will know the meaning of being a waitress.
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One of the harder aspects of the game, besides trying to keep all of your customers in check and happy, is the scoring system. Each day you have a certain amount of money that you need to make before you can break even or make a profit. These quotas begin to get rather high, so you have to work extra hard to make that much more for each day. This is where it can become a little frustrating for some people. At this point, you realize that DD is about more than just busing tables and serving food to customers. A deeper aspect of the game begins to shine through at this point. Your restaurant begins to have more upgrades. These additional upgrades, or tactics, give you the ability to serve drinks and other beverages to increases your customers’ overall mood.
Your customers are all color coded. Some are red, blue, and even mixed together. You start to notice the table chairs are color coded as well; matching customers with the same colored chairs will give you a bonus boost to your overall score.
There is more to Diner Dash than what you see on the surface. You have to do some real thinking to pull yourself out of some pretty tough jams. You will be real sorry if you don’t plan your tables wisely; people will quickly backup, resulting in money loss and ultimately failure.
Some of the other features in Diner Dash include: Endless Shift; which is a timed game mode where you must serve “x” number of people and make so much money before the clock runs out.
There is a multi-player feature where you can play co-op with another player. You must work together to complete the tasks at hand. Head 2 Head has you challenging another player to see who has what it takes to run the diner. The final mode, Team Dash, has eight players in teams of four to see who can be the king cheese of the diner biz.
Overall, Diner Dash has wonderful cell shaded graphics and a cute little soundtrack that keeps you in pace with waiting tables. This has to be one of the better arcade titles on the Playstation Network.
If you have played any of the Diner Dash games over the years, this is everything you love and more. I truly enjoyed this title. It makes you realize that you don’t have to spend a big chunk of change to get a good game. As the old saying goes: Great things surely do come in small packages.
Score: 8 out of 10
James “DaRipp3r” Pittaro
Platform: Playstation3 / PSN
Developer: Hudson
Developer– website
