Wedding Dash Review

Taking the addictive Diner Dash formula and adding a Jennifer Lopez-like wedding planner twist, Wedding Dash for the Nintendo DS puts you in charge of ensuring that the big day comes off without a hitch. From simple backyards to large banquet halls, play as Quinn, a perky lady with big dreams, and steer through impatient guests, fighting bridesmaids, and picky eaters to earn the most cash.

If you have read my Diner Dash: Flo on the Go review, you’ll pretty much get the gist of this game, which is basically a re-skinned version of that title. The main twists here are that you have to first select the right cake, food, and honeymoon based on the client’s wishes, then you get to the main gameplay, which is a familiar juggling act where you use your stylus to shift a waitress around to serve guests food, deliver presents, etc.

The goal, as in Diner Dash, is to make sure that all of the guests are attended to promptly so that they can move on to their final step (which is dancing). As usual, the difficulty ramps up pretty sharply, and you’ll eventually be left madly scrambling to keep up, even if you are a seasoned gamer. Part of the appeal of these types of games is that they are immediately accessible to casual gamers, but they also provide a stiff challenge once the game throws additional factors into the mix and speeds up the gameplay. There are fifty weddings in total, which is more than enough for hours worth of entertainment.

The visuals here are disappointing, for sure. The top screen, just as in Diner Dash, is wasted on a basic score counter (or money, in this case). It could serve better uses, such as keeping track of your success percentage or how many guests are left, etc. The bottom screen is where the action takes place, but even though there are various different layouts in terms of wedding reception locales, the graphics are still too simplistic and lack good animation.

While I understand that these games hardly depend on their presentation, a little more effort in the visuals and even the audio would’ve gone a long way towards creating a more compelling product, especially for non-casuals who may still be interested in the core gameplay. The audio here would be appropriate for a wedding, maybe, but could use a little more spicing up. The wedding guests can’t rely on slow dance music forever!

Finally, there is a competitive multiplayer mode where you compete with another player to see who can serve the most guests faster. When you look at the entire package, Wedding Dash is a solid re-imagining of the Diner Dash formula, but doesn’t add enough variety to really stand out. For fans of Diner Dash, this is obviously a no-brainer, since the core gameplay remains as addictive as ever and there is plenty of new challenges. For those looking for something new, Wedding Dash doesn’t really offer it, but I get the feeling it was never really trying to stray too far from its wildly successful predecessor.