Sally's Salon Review

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Game Description

Run the Perfect Salon!

Help Sally spread her salon savvy from her hometown shopping mall to the glittering lights of Hollywood in this colorful and engaging challenge!

Work with Sally to beautify everyone from little old ladies to punk rockers in 10 unique salon locations. Wash, dye, cut, style and more in 50 levels of frantic, but fashionable, fun.

Use your earnings to hire helpful employees and purchase salon upgrades to keep your clients looking and feeling their best. Only the stylist with the happiest (and best-looking!) customers will make the cut in this frenzy of family fun.

Sally's Salon Review

Cut, color and style! Get ready to do it all in this fast-paced task-management game. Sally's Salon will have you clicking furiously to give your customers all of the beauty salon treatments they desire. You must drag and drop your customers to their requested station, be it a shampoo, cut/color or a blow-dry. Once seated, you have to click each of the customers so Sally can perform the action they have requested and keep them moving through the stations, in order to serve all the customers in the salon. This game is fun, addicting, and a good play, especially for those who are new to the genre.

Customer Types May Keep You Guessing

Each customer knows exactly what they want and how long they are going to wait for it. As Sally, you must try to serve them as quickly as possible in order to earn enough money to keep your new salon going. There are different customer types, all of which seem to have different patience levels, but the game makes the mistake of not describing them. Every so often a new customer type will show up, but you aren't given any hints as to how patient they are or how much they tip. This is a pretty serious flaw, because you have to guess which ones will get angry first, which can end disastrously for the newer player. The gameplay is very simple to pick up (you drag and drop customers then click as fast as possible), but leaving out this critical feature makes it a lot less intuitive for new players.

Choose a Hair Style For Your Customers

In addition to the typical “drop them in the seat and click for services” gameplay, Sally's Salon offers a unique action to please your customers. When a customer requests a haircut or dye, you must scroll through several pictures of them until you find the style or color they want (they will smile broadly). This adds a little bit of variety to combat the repetitive, boring nature of this game. The choices you make are also reflected in the game, so if an old woman gets a hot pink beehive, she is shown that way afterward. It is rather fun to see what the customers look like when you are done with them. Unfortunately, the graphics are distracting and take away from the excitement of seeing the changes you have created in your customers. Everything is “bubbly” and sparkly in nature, limiting the game's already niche audience to those who like youthful graphics. Stars and hearts fill the air whenever you do something good, which is a sort of reward or recognition of your awesomeness, but also feels over the top.

Earn Money to Buy Upgrades For Your Business

To pass the level, you must make enough money in salon charges and tips to pass the Goal amount. If you do very well you can hit the Expert Goal, which rewards you with a cheer of “Woah! Awesome!” and a star on the level map. Other than personal pride there is not really a reason to reach Expert. At the beginning of each level, you can use your earnings to purchase upgrades for your equipment and for Sally. You can make her move faster or get a coffee machine to relax your customers. These upgrades help you keep up with the increasing level difficulty and get the best score you can. You can choose whatever you want, and your choices are really only limited by how much money you have to spend.

This is a great system, because you can personalize your equipment to your own requirements. Unfortunately, until you have gotten pretty far into upgrading all of your equipment, every action is really, really slow. It takes forever for Sally to do anything unless she is fully upgraded, which can get very frustrating, especially when customers are getting angry and leaving.

Conclusion - Cool Idea But Flawed

In general, Sally's Salon is a fun task-management game. It offers a unique kind of gameplay for the genre with the choices in hair cut and color and the whole game feels unique and different because of it. You can upgrade equipment and Sally herself in order to maximize your earnings, and services you give to customers are actually shown in the game, which is fun and rewarding. There are some major flaws, including the graphics and speed at which actions are completed, but in general this is a great game that is a lot of fun to play.

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