Wedding Dash

If Glu's Diner Dash is a pancake, then its wedding-themed cousin on trial today is a Yorkshire pudding. They're both essentially made from the same ingredients, but each has been twisted slightly at the end to create a subtly different dish. Both end up being almost universally palatable, though.

For those who have no knowledge of either Wedding Dash or its close matrimonial relation, both series are about reaction times and quick planning. Taking on the role of a wedding planner, your basic job is to seat guests arriving at the reception, serving them and seeing to their every need in order to make sure the happy couple stay happy.

Doing so is tricker than it sounds, however, as there's a lot more to do than simply serving food and whisking people away as quickly as possible; Wedding Dash is about co-ordination.

While at first dealing with all the guests can appear complicated, in truth it's incredibly straightforward. All actions are triggered by tapping in the table number followed by the seat number a guest is sitting at, rather than having each action assigned a separate key on the pad. For example, if you sit a particular guest at table number 6, seat 2, then all actions regarding that character, from delivering their gifts to serving them the various is dishes, are dealt with by hitting their table number and then their seat number.

In essence, Wedding Dash involves quickly tapping in numbers if and when you see a guest requiring some kind of assistance. Before you know it, you won't even be looking at the numbers on the screen any more, simply pressing the number keys as soon as you see someone wanting some attention.

This ease of control makes co-ordinating your moves a mental rather than a physical chore, and quick planning is vital. More points are awarded if you manage to pull off more than one action at once, so delivering a couple of meals while simultaneously seating new guests at a table and dropping off their gifts creates chains that multiply your score – a factor that becomes all the more important as the levels progress.

That's because each level in Wedding Dash comes with a points barrier that has to be surpassed in order to progress to teh next stage. Doing so is more case of feeding the five thousand and clearing them out – catering to each guest's particular nuances and making sure they stay happy is the only way of reaching that points barrier. And, as the levels fly by, there are more and more ways to ramp up that score.

In the midst of the catering catastrophe, you'll have to deal with bridesmaid scuffles and crying babies, the food catching fire on the hot plates and the peculiarities of almost each and every guest. It's not overstating the situation to say that some of Wedding Dash's latter stages really are non-stop action, throwing problem after problem at you, all at once. Decisions have to be made in a split-second, and while a second play through allows you to build some kind of strategy for success, on the whole, Wedding Dash is the archetypal quick fire arcade title.

That's a trait equally true of Glu's Diner Dash series and, while it's fair to say that differences between that franchise and this wedding day adventure are relatively few in number, it doesn't stop Wedding Dash being a solid title in its own right, managing to give fans of the Dash franchise another chance to hone their skills and newcomers an entertaining welcome to the mad world of table service in the process. Pancakes or Yorkshire puds – it matters not. When they're served up with this kind of panache, they're both taste pretty damn tasty.