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Wedding Dash
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Graphics & Sound:
The graphics in Wedding Dash are fresh and crisp and just what one would expect from another game in the Dash series. You play as the lovely Quinn, who gets recruited to become a wedding planner and ends up turning it into a full-time career. Quinn will work her way from backyard weddings, to a grand ballroom, to a cruise ship, to a secluded private island, and finally to a castle. The varied guests come in all flavors, from a drunk uncle, to a crying old aunt, to a hurried dance fiend, all the way to the hot young single chick that everyone wants to sit near - and everyone in between. The cake and flowers that you select for the wedding (more on that later) will appear in the background, so that's a nice touch. Plus, it's amusing to see the married couple sitting at the table near the back, talking to each other through word bubbles about the presents they are receiving and how wonderful their wedding is going.
The background music is excellent and varies from stately classical pieces to groovy tunes that make your guests want to get out on the dance floor and boogie. Plus, your DJ sports some kick-ass Elton John styled star sunglasses. Sound effects include people eating, glasses clinking, people chatting, plus the occasional drunken mumbling or crying outburst. |
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Gameplay:
You can select between Career Mode, which I'll explain below and Endless Reception, which is basically just surviving as long as you can while an endless number of wedding attendees make your life miserable. First and foremost, you are given a brief rundown on the happy couple and their wedding needs. Then you are presented with three choices in planning their wedding. You might be choosing their flowers, the dining choices (appetizer/main entrée/wedding cake) for the wedding or their honeymoon locale or any mix of those. For each correct selection, you'll earn $100, up to a $300 head start on your goal for the wedding. Once you "place the order", it's off to the wedding. There, you'll have the happy couple sitting at a table in the back, the chef prepping the food selections off to the right, and the guests' seating in the center. When a guest shows up, you click them and drag them to a seat at a table, then click them to pick up their gift, bring the gift to the couple's table to drop it off, then begin bringing them their appetizer, main entrée and finally cake, all as they request them by a bubble appearing above their head telling you what they want. As you progress through the game, you'll also have the option to bring a guest a drink when they request it, or even to drop off a music request to the DJ for them. It may sound easy, but when you have many guests all clamoring for their food, it can get hectic.
To throw a few kinks into the works, guests will ask to sit next to a particular person, or worse yet, to NOT sit next to someone. So there's a huge element of strategy involved in placement. Sometimes guests will ask for a certain table too. Then you've got the popular girl to factor in, the drunk uncle that no one wants to be near and the really slow and fast eaters. You can't put the slow eater next to the popular girl or she will take so long that others have to be seated elsewhere. Since your money and bonuses are based on pleasing the guests and you won't meet your goal if you anger too many of them, you have to keep all of this in mind.
There are also "mishaps" that are thrown in to keep you on your toes. Anything from a kitchen fire, to a barking dog, a drunken uncle rambling on, an aunt on a crying jag, a flurry of buzzing bees, no music due to A/V issues and even a bridesmaids' free-for-all are fair game for Quinn to have to handle. Fortunately, you can click on the problem and Quinn will address it, with the waitress not skipping a beat in her duties. |
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Difficulty:
When you begin by selecting the wedding choices for your couple, you are given all the info you need in their intro paragraph. You may have to extrapolate things a bit, but if the husband-to-be is allergic to shellfish, you know not to select the grilled shrimp for the appetizer. If they are looking for nightlife and New York is a choice, it's a dead giveaway. However, once there was one that I had to guess on simply because I am not familiar with the names of famous mountains in California. But most of the time, if you simply pay attention, you can get the maximum bonus money on this task. I really liked this aspect to the game, however, because it was just a little different than what you normally see.
Each locale begins with a relatively low and easily reachable goal, but they ramp up with each progressive level within a locale, of which there are 10. For an additional challenge, you can try for expert goal if you achieve the standard goal, but it's pretty tough to do on a regular basis, once you've made significant progress. Additionally, all of the progress that you have made as far as new guest types, plus new mishaps, stays. So the innate difficulty and complexity ramps up, along with your monetary goal. Overall, you can make steady progress in the game by sticking to it. However, there will certainly be levels that you may have to repeat, several times in fact, to get the needed monetary goal. The guest arrival order will remain the same in a given level, no matter how many times you have to repeat it, so it is possible to memorize the order so you know who to seat where. |
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Game Mechanics:
Point, click, done. Ok, while not quite that simple, it almost is. Wedding Dash is completely mouse-driven, aside from entering your Player Name at the very beginning. In the beginning, you'll click on the wedding choices for the couple, then click to phone in the order. Then you'll click on a guest and go through the motions I described earlier, sending your waitress all around in a tizzy. On the rare occasion, your waitress will actually be Flo from Flo's Diner in Diner Dash as she just happens to be Quinn's buddy. The regular waitress sort of looks like Michael Jackson, but anyway...
As you progress to a new locale, you'll be offered upgrades in the form of comfier chairs to keep guests more patient, a speedier chef for faster food prep, a larger chef's table to hold more food, a faster Quinn, a faster waitress and more expensive and tastier menu upgrades which net more money per item served. Choose wisely because sometimes, comfier chairs might make all the difference.
When I previewed this game, it ran incredibly slow on my PC, which is not a good thing for a Dash game. However, I played it on my laptop, which is a few years newer than my desktop PC, and it ran like a dream. The only other problem I encountered came in delivering drinks to guests. While the drinks don't disrupt the bonus chains you can create by grabbing two food items to deliver to two guests in a row, increasing your bonus money, sometimes I would click on the drink station and then several other tasks, essentially queueing the tasks up, and my waitress would stop what she was doing or would not go where I had sent her. While not a complete experience killer, it was annoying.
Overall, if you like time management games like Diner Dash or Cake Mania and the like, Wedding Dash is a no-brainer. It's a blast and throws some new and creative ideas into the mix, making it must-have stuff for the casual games fan. |
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-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows XP SP2/Vista, Pentium III 700 MHz or faster, 128 MB free RAM, DirectX 7.0 or later, 25 MB available disk space |
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Test System:
Sony VAIO laptop, 2GHz, 1GB Ram, integrated sound and video |
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