The game “Diner Dash” has been around for a while and most of you may have, at the very least, an idea of how it plays. In case you don’t, you’re a waitress trying perform a series of tasks via mouse clicks to satisfy customers and do waitress duties. “Drip Drip”, the game we’ll be looking at today, reminds me a little of “Diner Dash” except that it has a whole different theme. This time, you’ll be battling the forces of nature and trying to stop basements from flooding. Before I begin looking into flood insurance, I’d like to quickly thank Thomas Konkol, the owner of Imminent Games, for sending me a free review copy.
The main menu allows you to start a new game, load an existing one, and set game options. There are multiple profiles available, which I appreciate, especially since I’m sure the kids would like a crack at this sooner or later. The game options menu shows you what your controls are and lets you change the sound volumes. There’s also a fullscreen toggle. While the controls aren’t rebindable, they are extremely simple in that everything is done via the mouse.
Upon starting a new game, you’ll be asked if you’d like to participate in a tutorial, which is recommended for new players. Along the left side of the screen will be statistics regarding your bank roll, how bad the basement flooding is, and other important notifications. You’ll have a minimap available on the lower left, which you can use to quickly get around larger houses. Finally, the bottom of the screen lists out all of the tools you’ll have available to make it from level to level. The interface, I’ve concluded, works very well and I didn’t have any issues navigating it.
So, how does this game play out? Every level, water will be dripping through the house with the ultimate goal of flooding the basement. If the basement becomes completely flooded, you lose the level. To prevent this from happening, you’ll be using the tools along the bottom of the screen to catch the water as it drips and repair the house. The game starts you out with a few tools and introduces more as the game goes on. You’ll start out with an extremely cheap pan of sorts that doesn’t hold a lot of water, but will later have access to larger buckets and garbage cans that are slower, but hold more water.
Yes, I said slower. Your tools can be moved around the house after you purchase them. In fact, that’s part of the strategy. Since you have a limited bank roll, you’ll be caught between buying something and using what you already have. The player will need to find a balance between buying new tools and using what they already have, depending on the situation. It’s important to note that the bigger or better the tool, the more it costs to bring into play. Small pans are much less expensive than their larger bucket counterparts.
So, you put pans and buckets under dripping water and you’re good to go right? Wrong. These things fill up with water and become useless once they are filled to the top. You’ll have to click on them and order them to dump their water at the nearest window. They’ll come back to the spot they were on before automatically, but you’ll have to keep an eye on things to ensure that no overflows occur. I usually purchase a small pan and place it in the same spot of the drip and bucket, just so that it catches water when I tell the bucket to dump its water. You’ll be free to come up with your own strategies.
Besides dealing with water, you’ll have ghosts, lightning strikes, shaman masks, UFOs, and other bad guys to contend with. They’ll mainly choose a location or tool and you’re given a limited window to move them out of harms way before bad things happen. This can be a challenge, especially if you have your hands full already dealing with overflowing buckets. Walls also break from time to time, revealing a leaky pipe that ejects water at a fantastic rate…luckily you’ll have a hammer at your disposal to patch things up. You’ll have other tools available to clean up messes and soak up water from the floor, and like the other tools, they cost money.
Overall, Drip Drip is a fun game that is light enough to appeal to players of all ages. There are three difficulty levels, so kids and adults alike will be able to pick what kind of casual or challenging experience they’d prefer. You’ll also be awarded stars based on your performance, giving you reason to come back to previous levels. I personally enjoyed managing all of these mechanics at the same time, even if I didn’t always succeed. You’ll need quick reflexes and some organizational skills to keep up at the later levels. All in all, it’s worth the ten dollar price tag.
Final Verdict: 8/10
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You can learn more about and purchase this game by visiting the following websites:
http://imminentgames.com/Home.html
http://www.desura.com/games/drip-drip
You can help bring the game to Steam by voting for it on its Greenlight page, here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92988306
You can view play sessions, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um8ESr4Xnvc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Ah4k68nCg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haovgpUvn9U
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