Most games are aspirational to some extent. Most offer escape into a fantasy world, the chance to fulfil a lifelong ambition such as winning the World Cup or the chance to do a job you wouldn't dream of being able to do in real life.
It's strange then to come across a game like vipValet which puts the player into the role of a car park attendant.
I can’t imagine anyone really sitting at home thinking “if only I could park cars for a living, then my life would be complete.”
But then, ever since Flight Control arrived, chaos management games as they have been dubbed are quite the rage in the App Store, most of them involving traffic situations of some kind. Therefore, vipValet actually fits in quite well.
vipValet offers a strange concept to UK players as valet parking is not so common over here. However, it’s a simple enough service to understand. Customers arrive at the car park and put their trust in your driving skills to park their vehicles safely. They then want their cars delivered back as speedily as possible when they are ready to leave.
In this game you park each car by touching it and drawing a line to a suitable parking space. You return each car by touching and dragging it back to where the customer is waiting.
The game starts off easy enough, but the challenge soon comes from having many vehicles to manage at one time. You’ll fail if you keep customers waiting too long or if there are crashes in your car park.
At face value vipValet has the potential to be a very good game but it’s floored by what I consider to be one major flaw – everything in the game is just so tooting small!
The cars, the customers, the parking spaces – everything is just so very teeny tiny that playing the game is incredibly tricky. Dragging a car into a space is nowhere near as easy as it should be. You’re also slowed down by needing to do some very precise touching with your finger to hit the right car or right customer at the right time.
I haven’t had a game last more than a couple of minutes yet. Not because I’ve lost concentration, not because the number of vehicles has become overwhelming and not because I’m rubbish at the game – it’s just that it’s hard to do anything accurately.
Maybe less parking spaces and bigger cars would increase the enjoyment of playing this game.
Another problem is the alarming lack of patience shown by customers entering or leaving the car park. It only takes a couple of seconds for them to get grumpy and it’s really hard to please them quickly enough before it’s game over because of the clumsy controls and minute graphics.
All in all, vipValet is a neat concept for a chaos/time management game. Unfortunately it’s just not very playable in its current form.
Verdict: 5 out of 10 - This could have been a lot of fun but it’s more of a car crash than a dream drive
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