Review: Sally's Salon
by Simone Luker
July 8, 2009
Overview Sally's Salon is a strategy game where you need to keep customers happy by doing your salon duties in a timely manner, and doing what they like. You will wash, cut and dry your customer's hair at first, but each stage brings new challenges with dying stations and beautician stations, such as eye brow plucking. If you've played the new version of Sally's Spa it's virtually the same, but a hair salon. You can open numerous hair salon's around the globe with coast-to-coast salon's. If you perform well, you can also win awards, such as the Mall or Purse Award. Features Graphics: Compared to Sally's Spa the graphics are little pixelated and outdated. Chairs, people and salon look larger than in Sally's Spa. Game Play: I rated game play pretty low on Sally's Salon because when you click on customer's a square appears around them, when you click it again it will automatically move them to the station they need. The squares and the fact that it's automatic makes the game a little boring for game play. In Sally's Spa, however, you can move customers by dragging them to the appropriate seats. Same with the coffee and magazines, instead of designating them a magazine, instead you drag the magazine to the customer. Also, in some levels you need to move the screen around in order to see who's being seated and who's in the salon chairs. Being in vertical mode, this problem could be fixed if they made it horizontal mode instead. Sally's Spa has improved this by making it horizontal mode. While it took me some time to figure out how to give customers coffee and magazines, I did eventually figure it out. Much more process compare to SSally's Spa, since you can't just drag it to them. Shopping Time: Shopping Time is where Sally can upgrade her salon to have better seats for customers, additional seats, more magazines, employee help and more. Sally can buy relaxing candles, or buy a coffee machine that brews more coffee. It's all in an effort to have Sally's Salon the best salon it can be. The more you buy, the better your Salon will do by bringing in more customers or by helping keeping them happy if their just waiting around. You can buy much of the same stuff at Sally's Salon as in Sally's Spa, however, Sally's Spa does a better job of portraying the items you're going to buy. Music: The music for Sally's Salon is somewhat of an upbeat relaxation tune with some dance to it. There is only the option of turning the sound either on or off, so no function to put your own track down. The sound effects actually tell you when someone loses a heart, which is good. Breakdown The Good It's an addictive game, moving customers around trying to keep them happy and earn as much money as possible. Sally's Salon succeeds in having variety in the Salon such as washing, cutting, dying, drying and eye brow plucking. The Bad If you've played Sally's Spa then this will be a downgrade. It's got outdated graphics and transitions and will seem like you wasted your money. But if you buy this before Sally's Spa and you'll think it's great. Game play was the worst part of this game, simply touching customers to move around wasn't nearly as fun as having to move them yourself. Verdict If you have Sally's Spa I wouldn't bother with Sally's Salon until they can bring it up to newer standards. However, if your addicted to Sally's Spa and need more, then go for this. It has the same elements and same addictiveness, just not nearly as up to date.