XBLA Weekly: ‘Diner Dash’ & ‘Gyromancer’

It’s a good thing we’ve got two new Xbox LIVE Arcade releases this week, because there is really not much else that anyone could want to play.  Hudson brings us a port of the time management casual hit Diner Dash for 800 MSP, while Square Enix and PopCap form a tag-team of doom to bring Gyromancer to life at 1200 MSP.  Are either of these worth anyone’s time?

Diner Dash has seen a number of computer, console and mobile releases.  It’s the Xbox 360’s turn now.  I’ve never played any of them.  The game offers two single player modes: a play-as-long-as-you-can endless one, and a career mode that offers a steadily more complex series of tasks to be juggled.  On the multiplayer front, local players can get their co-op on, as well as some sort of head-to-head mode.  Similar features are offered on Xbox LIVE, with an additional mode for team play.

The game itself is based around the idea of running a restaurant, although this is no simulation of finances.  It all boils down to trying to juggle a series of tasks, doing them efficiently and quickly so that none of the customers get ticked off and write bad service on their tables in ketchup.  The game provides a good tutorial on how to do this, and continues introducing elements to make the experience more complex.  It’s more fun than it sounds.

I didn’t think it was too bad, really.  The game sports a cel-shaded look and generally simple appearance.  No one’s going to say it looks amazing, but stuff’s easy to tell apart.  I don’t know if it’s really worth 800 MSP in the long run, especially since the market is pretty saturated with these sorts of games.  Diner Dash is the first of its kind on the Xbox 360, so the trial might be worth a download for those who’re looking for something a little more laid back.

Gyromancer brings together Japanese RPG juggernaut Square Enix and North American casual game experts PopCap to provide another take on the Puzzle Quest formula.  Yes, PopCap and Square Enix teamed up to make a puzzle / RPG hybrid.  A match seemingly made in heaven?

I haven’t played through an awful lot of the game so far, but I did give it a decent shot.  The main puzzle of the game is based around Bejeweled Twist.  It’s still a match-three game, but instead of doing swaps, gems can only be rotated in 2×2 blocks, and only clockwise.  There’s no direct competition with the opponent.  In the Puzzle Quest games, the player would trade off turns with the AI.  In Gyromancer, the gem board is manipulated only by the player.  When enough matches or moves have been made, ability gems will appear on the board.  It isn’t a terrible system, and it works fine, but it failed to immediately pull me in like Puzzle Quest did.

The story takes place in some sort of forest that isn’t very nice, and also everyone’s fighting monsters in.  The main dude doesn’t actually fight and instead sends these monsters to battle.  Gameplay is split up into various levels and involves a map that needs to be navigated.  On each level, the ally monsters don’t regenerate health, so bringing the right dudes into fights and being efficient makes the levels doable.  I rather like this strategic aspect of having discrete stages with different goals.  The look of the game is very straightforward with single-frame, hand-painted art for characters and monsters, and colourful sprites for gems.  It looks very similar to Puzzle Quest, honestly.

There is one element that I have to call shenanigans on, though.  During the tutorial stages, the game encouraged me to use an item called Remedy to heal up one of my dudes.  What the game didn’t tell me was that items like Remedy are actually fairly rare.  They can’t be bought from stores, so I should save them for important fights.  The next time I needed one, I had zero, and was instead greeted with a prompt, asking me whether or not I wanted to go on the Xbox Live Marketplace.  As it turns out, there’s a 40 MSP Gyromancer Item Pack that can be purchased.  Thanks for keeping things classy, Square Enix and PopCap.

Apart from that, Gyromancer certainly seems decent.  It didn’t immediately grab me like Puzzle Quest did, and in some ways seems to be a step backwards.  The title only offers single player, which makes that 1200 MSP price point seem even steeper.  I’m looking forward to putting some more time into it and hopefully it’ll prove me wrong.  The trial is easily worth a download for fans of gem-matchers and Puzzle Quest in particular, although remember to save those Remedies (or invest in lots of MSP).