I went into my review of DinerTown Tycoon with a bit of a sense of dread. Admittedly, I've never played Diner Dash before, and although I've heard great things about it, I'm usually a tad wary about super-casual games. That being said, my fears were confirmed a short time after booting up the game and serving a couple of burgers. This game is as casual as it gets, and to be honest, I'm just not the target audience for that. However, I would be a fool to review this game as if it were targeted towards me, so instead I hired my girlfriend, Heather, to help me out with the review of DinerTown Tycoon, since she IS a member of the target audience.

Heather is the definition of a casual gamer. She loves her DS, thinks Viva Piñata is awesome, and likes playing some multiplayer Boom Blox or Castle Crashers with me from time to time, but just doesn't understand the glories of a twelve-hour Left 4 Dead LAN party. With this in mind, I was interested to see that she found DinerTown to be fairly entertaining, and even asked to play it after she had finished "reviewing it" verbally for me. "I think it's pretty fun," she told me as she munched on a snack. "I was a little confused by the pointless zombie thing, though" (I'll explain the zombies later). I asked her what she would give the game on a scale of 1 to 10 if she had to score it, and after some careful consideration she replied that it seemed like a 7 to her.

So it seems that this game succeeds in garnering some affection from the casual gaming crowd. It certainly wouldn't be a bad idea to buy it for your "not-so-hardcore" loved ones, at the very least. But what is DinerTown Tycoon? For those concerned with genres, it could best be described as a "restaurant dining market share competition simulator," which makes a lot more sense once you see the game.

As the player, you're managing a number of restaurants across DinerTown, and by serving specific numbers of differing types of customers, you can expand you restaurant chain and take back DinerTown from the evil clutches of "Grub Burger," a competing restaurant chain that puts a special ingredient in all its food to turn their customers into zombies and force them to eat their crappy food for an unspecified but assumed eternity. The fact that your competitors are evil is a bit unnecessary, and only serves to make you feel better about virtually participating in a somewhat frowned-upon practice: monopolization of an industry. Heather agreed with me that the zombie thing was a dumb addition to the game, but it doesn't really detract from its value.

Progression is made through the purchase of new recipes and restaurants to meet the daily demand of the customers, whom you deal with through a short sequence in which dozens of citizens storm a small section of the town where you and Grub Burger are located. They then choose to eat lunch at either your restaurant or Grub Burger based on advertising, how many decorations you've purchased, the quality and price of food being served, and their own personal preferences in food, which you can view to determine what your restaurants should serve.

On a critical level, there isn't much that DinerTown Tycoon does right. The game is short and extremely repetitive, as there aren't any real outcomes determined by ones actions other than "they did buy your food," or "they didn't buy your food." The little story-driven cutscenes that appear after each new area of DinerTown is unlocked are all absolutely terrible, and the story itself is a pointless addition. The art style is a bit meh, but not bad, and the game looks okay on even low-end machines, as it probably wouldn't be very taxing on a 10-year-old system. The tutorial is especially good, but much of the rest of the game doesn't seem to have had much work put into it. It's stupid easy to totally mess up a lot of progress, as well. Just once forgetting to buy more onions has the potential to result in everyone in town hating you and becoming zombified, which is a bit punishing for such a casual-friendly game.

I found DinerTown Tycoon to be mildly entertaining, but it didn't really pull me in. I realized, however, that the game was never designed to pull me in, but to pull people like my girlfriend in. As no one would review a Disney movie as though it were trying to be Citizen Kane, I won't review this game as if it were meant for me. I'm going with my girlfriend's call on this one, and as such DinerTown Tycoon deserves the positive score I gave it.

Players:1 player
Platform(s):PC
Developer:PlayFirst
Publisher:PlayFirst
ESRB:Everyone
Rating: