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Snowy: Lunch Rush

Score: 80%
ESRB: Everyone
Publisher: Alawar
Developer: Aliasworlds Entertainment
Media: Download/0
Players: 1
Genre: Arcade/ Family/ Simulation

Graphics & Sound:

When it comes to graphics in today’s games, when I buy a game, I sometimes worry if my machine will be able to play it. I don’t want to have to buy a new graphics card every few months to play the newest shooter. That’s where companies like Aliasworlds Entertainment with the publisher Alawar Games comes to my rescue! With the newest game in the Snowy the Bear series of games, Snowy: Lunch Rush, they provide an excellent downloadable game that won’t tax my graphics card. With entertaining, cartoon style animation in the game, and hand drawn comics between levels, Snowy: Lunch Rush is a breath of fresh air to this reviewer, who is very old school sometimes. Now, when I say old school, I do not mean cheap. A lot of care and artistry went into the environments which get better and better with each new level.

The game is not perfect in any way, shape or form. In the sound department, the game does tend to start to sound very electronic. It’s not bad, I am just not the biggest fan of the style. I will say this though, if they had used a bigger soundtrack with more realistic effects, the game would not have been as affordable as it is.


Gameplay:

Fresh from his adventures in the artic and in the dark jungle, Snowy the Bear has decided he is going to do something that so many people have tried to do, and so many people fail at. He is going to open a restaurant! With his new restaurant, Snowy realizes, or shall I say you realize that it is nowhere near as easy as it can sometimes look. Snowy: Lunch Rush is what I would call an arcade style sim. Your main function is to seat customers, take their orders, bring them coffee while they wait, bring their orders out from the kitchen, take their money after they are done, clean the table and then seat the next party before they get mad and leave. Sound simple enough? Well, its starts off pretty slow, but then the crowd starts to show up and the line of people waiting for a table is almost out the door.

You have two choices of game play. You have the Career Game, where you go through 60 levels. In the beginning, it takes you slowly through the restaurant business and teaches you how to handle different types of customers, how long a teenage girl will wait for a table compared to a business man waiting for a VIP table, etc. After some levels, it will upgrade your restaurant giving you the ability to calm the savage customer with a cup of coffee while they wait for their meal, and you can even sing a song to the waiting crowd. I might have been imagining it, but I think more people left after I started to sing.

The second choice is to play an Endless Game. This is more of an arcade game where you serve as many customers as you can as fast as you can. After your score gets to a certain level, you can upgrade your restaurant like adding more tables, adding a drive-thru, new equipment so the cook can cook faster and so on.


Difficulty:

Snowy: Lunch Rush starts off very simple, but around one third of the way through, it will soon get almost impossible to beat. I won’t tell you how long I was stuck on level 20. In Career mode, the difficulty is set for you where the first 20 levels or days in the game are the easiest, the next 20 are medium difficulty, and the final 20 are the most difficult. In Endless Game mode, you can choose your difficulty, but only according to how well you are doing in the Career game. If you have completed all 20 levels of the easy part, it unlocks the medium difficulty. If you complete the next 20, it unlocks the hard difficulty. Well, I assume it does. I actually haven’t gotten there yet.

Game Mechanics:

Snowy: Lunch Rush has a very simple point and click interface. You click Snowy and then you click on where you want him to go and what you want him to pick up. The true question is, how fast can you go, how fast can you go?

Snowy: Lunch Rush is downloadable, so try it out first before you buy it, but trust me, you will want to buy it so you can eventually conquer it.


-Wickserv, GameVortex Communications
AKA Eric Wickwire

Minimum System Requirements:



Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, Pentium 500MHz, 128MB RAM
 

Test System:



Windows XP, 3.00 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, Integrated 5.1 channel audio 1 GHz of RAM, Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 9002

Microsoft Xbox Monster 4x4: World Circuit Sony PlayStation 2 Driver: Parallel Lines

 
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