Reviewed: June 22, 2007
Reviewed by: Ansel Newcome-Beill
Publisher
Eidos Interactive
Developer
PlayFirst
Released: May 23, 2007
Genre: Strategy
Players: 1-2
7
6
6
5
6.8
Supported Features
After years of grease burns, whiney customers and lousy tips, my petty days with the food service industry have finally come back to haunt me in Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve, which brings all the fun and excitement of the food service industry to the Nintendo DS.
The Diner Dash license has seen some uncanny success with its various releases for both the PC and Mac, with very accessible and addicting gameplay. Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve is the most recent addition to the lineup of Diner Dash games and attempts to bring the same engaging gameplay to the portability of handheld systems.
Just as in previous releases, Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve has players controlling a waitress by the name of Flo. A corporate executive who grows tired of the hustle and bustle of her 9 to 5 and decides to fix up a run down restaurant instead. Players will help Flo perform all manner of typical restaurant services, from taking orders, to cleaning up spills and properly seating customers. If the player does well enough, they can purchase upgrades to their restaurant and eventually work at different themed restaurants as well.
Each restaurant the player is presented with has a series of levels, each of which have a set amount of tips the player must earn to move on to the next level. The player earns tips by seating and serving customers and earns better tips based on the level of happiness of each customer. Players also earn additional tips by chaining different tasks together and seating customers based on their different colors. All of this is done through the relative ease of the touch screen and is relatively easy to manage, but is slightly easier in the computer versions of Diner Dash with the help of a mouse and a slightly larger screen.
Diner Dash does mix things up a bit by giving the player different types of customers to deal with such as families, college students and cell phone addicts. The player is also given different tasks to juggle at the same time like taking orders and clearing tables. This tends to get tricky as more and more tasks are introduced as the game progresses and takes on a bit of a puzzle element. For example, if players seat the “cell phone addict” customer in the center of the restaurant, they will upset all the adjacent customers, so they will have to try and seclude them from other customers, or seat them next to customers who don’t mind the noise, such as families or other cell phone addicts.
These kinds of mechanics are the basis of Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve, but are surprisingly simple as they just learn as they go. This gives the game a casual, “pick up and play” status, however, the game is anything but easy, the level of multi-tasking required in some levels often times has things descending into chaos in the blink of an eye. Often times I found myself randomly pecking at the screen with my stylus in some desperate attempt to appease my masses of rabid customers.
There are a handful of different game modes in Diner Dash: Sizzle and Serve. Both the career and endless shift modes make a return from the previous games, as well as a few multiplayer modes. Career mode simply has the player fulfilling the goal amount in each restaurant and progressing to the next level, whereas endless shift has the player in one restaurant, gradually earning upgrades as they serve more customers, such as a stereo that keeps seated customers happy, or running shoes that help Flo move faster.
The new multiplayer modes are by far the biggest change from previous versions of Diner Dash and are fairly interesting. “Highest Score“ has 2 players competing for the most tips, in “First to Serve” players have to seat a set number of customers before the other, and in “Survival” mode players play an endless round but are not allowed to lose more than 3 customers. These new modes add a new level to the Diner Dash series and give a whole new reason to play the game.
Apart from the fact that they look like they have been dumbed down to 16-bit status, many of the graphics from the original Diner Dash Games make a return in Sizzle & Serve. The restaurants and customers don’t look all too different from their earlier iterations. All of this gives a certain sense of familiarity to anyone who has played the game before, but also gives off a sense that I’ve seen this already, but it looked better the first time around.
This isn’t to say that Sizzle & Serve looks bad, the sprites are cute and vibrant, and the variety of restaurants with customization options make sure the settings don’t get too stale, but when you begin to compare Sizzle and Serve to it’s earlier (and not to mention cheaper) counterparts, it begins to lose its luster, lacking some of the animations and larger sprites of the original games.
A bigger concern however is the limited size of the screen on the DS. Because the screen is so small, not only do things begin to look terribly crowded, but the player can’t see the waiting line and the restaurant seating at the same time like in previous versions. This requires the player to tap a tiny icon in the corner of the screen to change the view back and forth, and starts to become a hassle when you’re already trying to juggle 14 different tasks at once.
Just like its graphics, Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve borrows much of it’s sound from it’s earlier versions. Except this time around they tend to lack in variety and detail. The sound effects get to be repetitive and stop short of being an annoyance. There are all of but 5 music tracks in the game which get old quickly and lack the fun and bouncy sound of the tracks from the original games.
There are around 40 individual levels in the career mode of Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve, but these tend to wear off rather quickly considering that each level is essentially the same thing repeated and each level takes about 8 minutes to complete. The endless shift mode does help to add an extra bit of life to this game, but even with the brand new multiplayer content, it’s really nothing that Diner Dash players haven’t done before.
While the game is indeed addictive, there just isn’t enough extra content to keep players coming back once they have completed the career mode. Unless you are truly addicted to the other Diner Dash games, it’s really hard to recommend Sizzle & Serve when comparing its 30 dollar price tag against the meager 10 dollars players will have to shell out for the better, previous versions of the game.
Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve is nothing short of addictive and just plain fun thanks to is simple gameplay that is fantastic in small doses. While the game does get old after awhile, it does a great job killing the time spent waiting for that next burger to get to your table. Die hard fans of the Diner Dash series or simply anyone welcome to the idea of casual games will be nothing short of satisfied, but players wanting more than just a 15 minute game break may just want to ask for the check.
