iPhone App Review: Sally’s Spa

Help Sally manage a beauty spa in this time management game.

The Good

• Solid game play. The set-up is similar to other time management games: guide customers (and Sally, so she can tend to them) through several stations (sauna, face mask, massage, hot tub, manicure). Each customer has a slowly dwindling satisfaction meter, so time is of the essence. At the end of each level, Sally spends earned money on furnishings, merchandise, and employees to make her job easier. The game is very responsive, in particular the tapping and dragging to move customers from station to station.
• Lots of welcome variety: each station lets Sally perform a particular task via a pop up window. To apply a face mask, you shuffle through several varieties, watching the customer’s facial expression to choose the correct one. The manicure features a hand with fingernails to tap. The variety of purchasable items is also extensive, including co-workers who can help manage stations, and a display rack that houses beauty products (you even get a menu showing their current demand) that you can sell for extra income. Sally also gets to travel the world as she completes levels, opening spas in different cities.
• Great graphics. Starting with a clean anime style, particularly neat are small details like transparency effects, changing facial expressions, and different customer genders and ethnicities (male model, goth girl, and an elderly couple that cannot be separated, so they require two seats at any station). But the best aspect is an awareness of basic usability: each station and moveable item has a thicker, black outline, making them easier to discern from the background.

The Bad

• Minor annoyances: the workers you hire are are comically specific. The herbal tea maker brews tea but otherwise just stands at the counter - you still have to deliver the beverages to the customers yourself. Eventually, the spa employs several workers who merely perform their assigned tasks and then stand around doing nothing, while Sally runs around like a maniac. Second, some of the purchasable items are ludicrously priced (several hundred dollar magazine subscriptions and thousand dollar “patience candles”). Perhaps Sally is in the wrong business.

Conclusion

Sally’s Spa is a solid, fun variation on the time management genre. But the biggest reason for a thumbs up: Despite avoiding salons like the plague, and having zero interest in manicures, pedicures, and massages - I’m hooked on this game. Sally’s Spa has brought out my closet metrosexual. Highly recommended, and absolutely worth $0.99.

Random Posts

• How to export photos from iPhoto to your Facebook account
• How to share screens using Leopard
• Mac security tip - set a screensaver password
• Pimp out Mac Wallpapers with Desktopia
• Worst. Timing. Ever.