![]() ![]() Indeed, playing the first few levels of Cooking Dash 2016 – which sees you take charge of a number of different restaurants in a bid to win favour on some kind of reality TV show – is like taking a trip back to any of the time-management games that have hit mobile over the course of the last decade. This is all fairly standard stuff for a time-management game. If that sounds like a lot of work, then try doing it for multiple customers at once, each one wanting something different to eat – some with sides, some with drinks, some with both – and with only a limited number of cookers, sous chefs and, ultimately, hands at your disposal. Someone wants a roast chicken? You better pick up a raw, plump bird with one tap, then, before dropping it off on the skewer with another tap, picking it up again once it’s cooked with a further tap, and finally delivering it plated up to the customer with one final tap. In practice, this means a whole lot of tapping, with Flo going exactly where you tell her in the order in which you tell her to. The basic setup here – and one that’s gradually expanded as you progress through the stages – is that you cook and serve various different dishes to order, with customers making their wishes known and handing you a certain amount of time in which to fill them. Cooking Dash, like every Dash game before it, is a matter of performing multiple tasks in quick time. Initially, the new payment model has very little impact on proceedings. It also means that, unless you’re willing to pay, you can also only take it on in short bursts. Time management and free-to-play remain entirely different entities, of course – one is a genre, the other a monetisation method – but Glu’s decision to revive waitress Flo and her Dash IP comes with the move to make it a freemium release, which means that what we have here is a game that’s both time management and free-to-play at the same. Diner Dash, I often cite, was one of the first, and though the genre most definitely falls into the ‘casual’ category – much like many free-to-play releases – the two are very much not the same thing, I like to point out while chortling.Īnd then Cooking Dash 2016 comes along, and makes me look a bit silly. Time-management games hand you a hundred million tasks to do and only a short amount of time to do them. It’s a misunderstanding that explains the number of puzzled expressions I’ve generated when I’ve told people I’m something of a time management fan, and the countless hours I’ve spent delightfully informing people of the error of their ways. ![]() The energy system deployed within many F2P games, they argue, forces people to wait if they’re not willing to spend, meaning they have to ‘manage’ their ‘time’. For as long as free-to-play has been a force in mobile gaming, so many have mistakenly used the term ‘time management’ when trying to describe it.
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