Overall rating 3 / 5.
Sporting retro pixel art and a gameplay identical to Diner Dash, Sally’s Salon is the Xbox Live game for this week on Windows Phone. In this game, Sally, the owner of a hair styling salon, goes to work in her own salon as she slowly buys more equipment and hires assistants to expand her chain of salons. If you are wondering what makes this the Luxury Edition, and where the other editions are hiding, Sally’s Salon is actually a game already available on the PC and iOS.
The game description on Zune reads:
Enjoy the ultimate makeover of Sallys Salon in the brand new Luxury Edition of the hit time management game for high-end devices. Sallys Salon has just received its very own makeover and is ready to dazzle you with classic fun and fresh surprises. Enjoy fantastic features new to mobile, including 5 additional locations with exciting challenges, more customer types, extra trophies, upgraded graphics, enhanced visual effects and more! Join Sally in this fabulous fight to beautify little old ladies, punk rockers and impatient celebrities with the hairstyles they want. From humble shopping mall beginnings to superstar status in Hollywood, youll help her wash, dye, cut, style and much more! Use your earnings to hire helpful employees, purchase salon upgrades and to keep clients happy with soothing accessories. Can you be a cut above in this fashionably fun mobile game?
I am writing this review based on the trial version’s gameplay, which is all of 5 levels. The full game features 75 levels, which I am sure are much more challenging.
When the customers come in – and they are of all ages and genders – you have to take them to the seat of their choice, give them a shampoo, a hair color, a haircut and a blow drying session, or any subset of the above, and then collect payment. The quicker you do this, the more money you make. This is essentially the same gameplay as Diner Dash with a different set of sprites.
Sally’s Salon sporting suitable scenes of stylish hair. (Always avoid Alliteration?)
The good thing about Diner Dash, was that it was all point and click. You click on the tables, and Flo follows your clicks sequentially. While she is busy delivering food, you are busy queuing up other tasks for her. Unfortunately, in Sally’s Salon, two of the tasks – a haircut and a hair color – require you to click and then choose a matching hair style from a pop up dialog box. The effect of this dialog box is that you can no longer queue any tasks in the background. You must stop and click through the different styles till you find the one that makes the customer happy. This is not a fun activity. It is a chore. A fun activity is frantically clicking the people and tables with as much speed as possible while trying to optimize the path so that minimum time is wasted. Here all you are doing is a mind numbing click, click, click till you find the picture with the smiling patron. I can tell you, after I found the matching hairstyle, most of my taps to confirm the cut were rather vindictive. That is not something you would be looking for within 5 levels of gameplay.
It also interrupted my flow and made me lose my train of thought, leading me to some very frustrating gameplay.
However the graphics in the game are good, the tutorial is well thought out and the music is pretty nice. I also think that this game serves well to fill the gap of time management games in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
An upgrade screen in Sally’s salon. Wash hair twice as fast!
Since this is an Xbox Live title, and it gets premium placement in the marketplace along the likes of Plants Vs Zombies and Tentacles, it behooves me to hold this to a higher standard than I would hold an indie game. For that reason, I find it unable to rate the game higher than 3 out of 5. However, if you have enjoyed Diner Dash, and like time management games, do not hesitate to try out Sally’s Salon from the marketplace.
Sally’s Salon Luxury Edition can be found on the Zune Marketplace here.
