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Wendy's Wellness

Score: 70%
ESRB: Everyone
Publisher: Sugar Games
Developer: Sugar Games
Media: Download/1
Players: 1
Genre: Puzzle (Time Management)

Graphics & Sound:

Wendy's Wellness is a time management game very much along the lines of Wedding Salon, another Sugar Games time management title. As Wendy, the new manager of a salon, it is up to you to keep your customers happy, while expanding your business by improving your current location and also moving on to bigger and better things.

The look of Wendy's Wellness is bright and cheerful, but just a little bit off. The customers that frequent your shop range from the Flirt, to the Bride, the Jock, the Wrestler, the Businessman, the Ballerina, the Chubby (yeah, you heard me right - offensive, no?), and people in between. It's not that they look bad, they just look a little bit odd. Wendy, herself, looks slightly 80's throwback and her assistants at the salon - let's just say that I wouldn't want the tanning booth operator to come near me. The salons themselves work well enough for the game and will vary in appearance depending on their location, of which there are a total of 10, but they don't vary too terribly in appearance. The one thing that I really enjoyed was the colorful aquarium behind the register that increased waiting customers' patience. You can purchase additional fish and they were truly pretty.

I really had a hard time with the sound aspect of Wendy's Wellness. The background music is peppy and pleasant and works just fine, but the sound effects from the patrons are, at best, annoying and in some cases, downright disturbing. Some of the sound effects came straight from Wedding Salon, but these pornographic sounds seem to have become more prevalent in Wendy's Wellness. No one can be that happy and excited over an exercise routine, I tell you. If they weren't necessary to gameplay, I would have turned them down completely, but you do need to hear what's going on and the audio cues are important to let you know when a new customer has entered the facility.


Gameplay:

In Wendy's Wellness, Wendy's goal is to keep the patrons of her gym happy and fit and she has numerous ways of accomplishing this. At first, she'll start off with just a few machines, but then she'll add upgrades. When the customers enter the gym, they sit in the waiting area, which holds a total of three people. You'll first drag a customer to the weights area and assist them, which takes a few seconds per client. Then they may want to go to the treadmill, which takes another few seconds and there's a micro-mini-game to play. You'll see a circle with equally sized color-blocked areas of red, green and yellow, with an arrow that moves around the circle in a clockwise fashion. Your goal is to click your mouse button when the arrow goes into the green area. Since there are a few different things to be done on treadmills, sometimes you'll assist a patron on the treadmill, only to have to return to them when they want to do something else. Next, they often want to soak in the spa, where you have another micro-mini-game. Here, you are presented with a grid of nine squares, representing things like temperature and bath salts in the water. Underneath three of these grid squares is a happy sun face and you need to hover over each square so that it will appear, then you click it. It doesn't take a lot of brain power, just time... time you may or may not have. Sometimes patrons will want a back massage, so you'll drag them to the massage table and until you hire an assistant, you'll give the back massages, complete with the massage table bouncing up and down as you pound the client's back. Some clients may want to do yoga and you have a yoga mat for them to use while they workout, but with your assistance, of course, and another micro-mini-game similar to the spa one. Finally, you'll get tanning booths in your shop and those take the push of a button and a few seconds of your time. Last, but not least, you'll have to check your clients out at the register and only four can line up at a time, so if you have clients waiting to be checked out, they can stack up around the shop.

Sometimes Wendy's uncle, who is a well-seasoned gym manager, will show up to relieve her at the gym so she can take a yoga class or something like that. Since he is more skilled, the micro-mini-games are easier for him. The treadmill circle has a much larger section of green, making it that much easier to click it, and the grid for the spa has a tiny sun in the corner of at least one of the correct grids as a clue so you know which one to hit. Wendy can also hire assistants as one of her upgrades, but more on that in Game Mechanics.

In addition to the little mini-games within the 50 levels of the game, you will also have to play VIP Training mini-games in between levels. These really weren't fun and I know they put them in there to give you a little something different to do, but I didn't like them much at all. Some may have your client running in a side-scrolling fashion and you have to click the mouse button so they'll jump over obstacles. Another one might have you trying to balance a gymnast on a balance beam that falls left or right and you must keep it centered. Still another one might be a game of memory where you flip over cards and match the healthy foods by clicking on the ones where you remember their locations. Doing well in these earn you bonus gold coins and you'll use those to upgrade things like Wendy's speed or charisma, the ability to earn bigger tips, or you can even gain an extra clue in the spa or yoga games.

As with all time management games, your customers have little hearts above them indicating their patience. When you get down to the last heart, they are mad and about to leave. Some are more impatient than others and some insist upon being served first, so be sure to pay attention to the little clues you get at the beginning of each level to see who to watch closely that level. You also have a monetary Goal to achieve in each level in order to progress, as well as an Expert Goal you can try to achieve.


Difficulty:

Wendy's Wellness is not really hard, per se, but the difficulty lies in getting to everyone before their patience runs out. Working with each customer at each piece of equipment takes several seconds and while you can queue Wendy up to do a number of things in a row, if you get to one requiring you to do a micro-mini-game, then in your fit of clicking, you may not have noticed that you didn't actually get to click on a customer to queue them up in line. Further, some clients insist upon being served before others, so it's a dance to make sure you keep everyone happy. I did find that I often was able to achieve the Expert Goal, so the overall difficulty isn't too high.

Game Mechanics:

Wendy's Wellness only uses mouse clicks for all of your actions. In fact, except for using the right mouse click to cancel an action, you'll use the left mouse click for everything else. You'll be responsible for dragging a customer to whichever station they want to visit, then clicking on them to attend to their needs. Once they are ready to move on, you'll drag them to their next destination. Once they are finished with everything, you'll drag them to the cash register and check them out. This is something that Wedding Salon managed to do differently and better because of it. Once your customer was done, they'd walk by themselves to the cash register, which was much better than you having to drag them there as you do in Wendy's Wellness. Since you may have four customers built up already at the checkout line and several more in various places around the gym waiting to be checked out, it would have been nice had they all meandered up to the register on their own as you cleared the ones in line.

As you make money in each level, it will build up and you can use it to improve your gym and to also hire permanent assistants to help make your workload that much easier. You can improve upon the comfort of your waiting chairs, upgrade your gym equipment so that it works quicker and is more comfortable to help with customer patience, and you can hire an assistant to help with the weights area, the tanning bed, and the massage table. You can also purchase health drinks to increase hearts for one patron and scented oils, which are triple the price, but increase the patience of all customers in the gym. It's a good idea to keep these on hand for when you get behind and need a pick-me-up.

Overall, Wendy's Wellness is just okay. Yes, it's a time management game and it does some things well, but the mini-games are annoying and I can't get past the disturbing sound effects from the customers. I am typically driven to beat every time management game I play, but with Wendy's Wellness, I had to stop once I got to the 6th venue (out of a total of 10) because I just didn't find that I was enjoying it very much. Try the demo out for yourself before you buy.


-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications
AKA Ashley Perkins

Minimum System Requirements:



Pentium 800 MHz or better, Windows 98/ME/2000/2003/XP and Windows Vista, DirectX 7.0 or better, 50 Mb free hard drive space, Mouse
 

Test System:



Windows Vista, 2 GHz AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core Processor, 8GB RAM, Realtek High Definition Audio On-Board Sound, NVIDIA GeForce 8300

Related Links:



Windows Matchmaker: Joining Hearts Microsoft Xbox 360 The Hearts of Men

 
Game Vortex :: PSIllustrated