Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve review

Over time, you’ll remodel, buy more restaurants and outfits, and get new gear like a bench or jukebox to make patrons more patient and dessert stations to get them to tip more. You’ll start seeing different customer types (there are eight in all), each with different levels of patience for waiting, tolerance of noise, and tipping tendency. You can also hire help, like pianists or dancers, bus boy, waiter, and so on.

Both versions feature 70 levels and 3 multiplayer modes (survival, high score, and the race-like First to Serve), but the DS version leaves the PSP version in the dust thanks to vastly superior controls. The DS uses the touch screen, so Flo can go from the counter to table three to the dessert station to table four to the bus station in five quick stylus taps (though dragging and dropping customers to their seats takes extra care). On the PSP, cycling through those same attractions would take around eleven presses of the d-pad and five button taps. It makes a big difference, and as a result, the PSP version gets abnormally hard awfully early on. Many gamers, especially the casual players Diner Dash is targeted to, will have trouble getting past just the first restaurant.