We thought it would be fun to review some of the casual games we currently have available in our JA Casual Game Center. Needless to
say, these games are very addictive and while our enthusiastic reviews
are, for the most part short, the time spent playing these games
is not. Once you have read the review, drop by the JA Casual Game
Center and download a free trial version of the game for yourself,
but remember – you have been warned!

Ahem…okay, class, this
review will make heavy use of acronyms, and some of what I’m about
to say can be confusing. So please listen up.

Diner Dash (DD)
games — and Flo, herself — have gone through considerable changes
since I first loaded up the
original back in 2006.

Original Flo

Current Flo

Before I lanuch into a
review of the game at hand, I feel a little background, as I understand
it, is in order. Folks new to the DD franchise who visit the PlayFirst
site could be baffled by what’s going on.

The first three DDs are
self-contained and play as any time-management game would. After the
aforementioned original, we have Restaurant
Rescue (DD2) and Flo
on the Go (DD3). So far, so good.

Now, let’s pay Hometown
Hero (DD4) a brief visit. There are two versions of this
game: the one I played and reviewed which was released first; and
a subsequent Gourmet version (DD4 Gourmet).

DD4 Goumet offers more
extras (500+ clothing and decor items, for instance), has a multi-player
feature, and can accommodate restaurant add-ons at $4.99 a pop. Folks
who had the original version were out of luck when it came to playing
the add-ons. It’s not clear why PlayFirst chose to do things this
way.

Okay,
let’s fast-forward to the present again. What we have before us now
is Diner Dash: Seasonal Snack Pack. If this
sounds add-onish, there’s a good reason. The five restaurants bundled
in this game represent the add-ons for DD4 Gourmet. So those who have
bought and played the add-ons will find nothing new here.

I feel I should point out
that purchased à la carte from PlayFirst, the five additional
restaurants come to $24.95. In contrast, the Seasonal
Snack Pack bundle is $19.95.

That having been said,
the restaurants in Seasonal Snack Pack are
all new to me. They consist of the summertime-themed Coral Cove; Crypt
Cafe, decked out for Halloween; the Thanksgiving-themed Hometown Harvest;
Winter Wonderland, which features a ski lodge; and Romantic Rendezvous,
a snazzy, upscale establishment with Valentine’s Day trappings.

The
first thing I noticed about Seasonal Snack Pack
is that either my skill at time-management games has skyrocketed (I
doubt it), or the first 50 levels are quite easy (more likely). I
had no difficulty making expert in all of them — in some cases, 15,000+
points past expert. I think this may be due to a couple of things:
(1) For the most part, customers have more patience than in previous
DD games; and (2) Many levels are quite long, allowing players more
time to build up scores.

Interestingly, I’ve seen
a lot of player reviews that say Seasonal Snack Pack
is too difficult. This has me wondering if we’d even played the same
game.

Achieving
all expert scores unlocks five Expert Levels — one for each restaurant.
It’s in one of these Expert Levels that the game turns brutal. For
some unfathomable reason, this almost always happens in time-management
games — and always far enough along in the game that it doesn’t show
up in the free evaluation period (typically an hour). So unless players
have read up on the game beforehand, they’ll purchase the game unaware
of the brick wall they’ll be hitting at some point.

In the interest of avoiding
a spoiler, I won’t mention the level in which the escalation of difficulty
occurs. Mercifully, however, it isn’t as bad as Flo’s Inferno in DD4.
I was able to snag an Expert Score after five or six tries.

Unike its predecessors,
Seasonal Snack Pack‘s first-level tutorial
covers only a few basics, so I suggest that any newbies to the franchise
have a good look at the game’s help files. It would also help to explore
the Diner Dash Neighborhood site at http://www.playfirst.com/dinerdash/.

Okay — still with me?
I hope so.

None
of what I’ve said so far means that the collection of restaurants
in Seasonal Snack Pack is bad. Far from
it: I enjoyed them considerably. The graphics, animation, music and
sounds in all five restaurants are quite pleasing. Two of them, Coral
Cove and Hometown Harvest, feature outdoor settings. In a nice touch,
the lighting in Hometown Harvest changes gradually from daytime to
dusk.

I especially enjoyed Crypt
Cafe, with its eyeball stew (a witch does the cooking), zombies who
mill around, an owner’s portrait that watches the proceedings, and
some decidedly undead-looking customers. In fact, the lovebirds look
worse than I do when I get out of bed in the morning. Now that’s scary.

One caveat, though, for
you arachnophobes: there are spiders here. And starting in Level 7,
a rather large one crawls around on the floor perilously close to
Flo’s podium.

Seasonal
Snack Pack retains a lot of things from the original
five restaurants in Hometown Hero (DD4). It offers few new
menu items and there are no new customer types. But it does have some
different outfits for Flo and some new restaurant upgrades.

I do recommend Seasonal
Snack Pack despite the relative lack of challenge in
its first 50 levels and overkill in one of the Expert Levels. If you
are, however, looking for more consistent levels of difficulty in
a time-management game, I suggest trying any of the other DDs, the
Cake Mania series, Turbo
Pizza or Turbo
Subs.

I have a few parting comments
now about the Diner Dash franchise. Five additional restaurant add-ons
have been released since the five that are represented here. These
restaurants are also available as a bundle called Diner Dash:
Flo Through Time.

As
far as I know, DD4 Gourmet is the only DD game that can accommodate
add-ons. So I can only surmise that the five new restaurants, if purchased
separately, become part of that game. Folks who don’t own HH Gourmet
are again obliged to go with the bundled version.

It would certainly help
if PlayFirst would provide some clarification about all of this in
a prominent place on the Diner Dash Neighborhood site. I’ve explored
the site (including the forums), but I’ve been unable to find anything
definitive.

One thing’s for sure: the
Diner Dash franchise — which has also spawned a slew of
other “Dash” games, such as the recently released Parking
Dash and Fitness Dash — seems to be going its own way,
to the point that it’s no longer comprised of self-contained units
and represents more than a traditional casual game series. It wouldn’t
surprise me a bit to see other successful casual series follow suit.

Try
Diner Dash: Seasonal Snack Pack for Free!