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Jet Set Go
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Graphics & Sound:
The graphics in Jet Set Go are just what you'd expect from the creators of Sally's Salon; bright, colorful, engaging and fun. Your customers are really detailed and each one has their own look and personality. Whether you are helping plan trips for Power Moms who are in a hurry, Super Models who are dressed to the nines, or even Millionaires who need a vacation from their vacations, the characters are sure to please. I like how the super touristy character had a pseudo Mickey design stitched to her cropped pants and the backpacker girl was dressed exactly like Lara Croft, only without Ms. Croft's most famous assets.
Aside from the customers, you have the three travel agencies you'll open, along with all of the ports of call you'll visit, making sure your customers have the time of their lives. Your offices will be in Montreal, London and Hong Kong, each with appropriate background music and style. Each office has several large flat screen televisions hanging on the wall, displaying the various destinations, and I really liked this because it would be a hint as to which locations would soon be available for trips, and the pictures looked really realistic.
I loved the extra touches in the cities you'll visit, like the Eiffel Tower in the far background of Paris, the New York skyline twinkling in the distance, and even the beautiful mountain scenery of the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon. The look is somewhere between cartoony and realistic, and it really added to the ambience.
Music for every level was great, and the sound effects were really good as well. Whether it was tickets printing out or customers thumbing through brochures, everything sounded great. Just like in Sally's Salon, however, your customers will acknowledge all of your actions by saying "Oooh," "Uh huh," "Okay" and things of that nature. It can get old during the mini-games while on vacations, because you are rapidly moving people around and all you hear is "Uh huh" constantly. |
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Gameplay:
You are just starting a new travel agency in Jet Set Go. In order to progress, you need to satisfy your customers, earning excitement, and also money to buy upgrades and finally travel to exotic locations and make sure your customers have a blast. As you go through levels, the Excitement, Appeal (upgrades) and Satisfaction (travel) bars will fill. Once they are full, these translate to a gold star for your agency, with your goal being to make each agency a 5 gold star office.
You start off in Montreal, with a basic office offering brochures for travel and the ability to book trips and print travel documents. As you progress, you'll have the opportunity to help customers select the type of meal they'll have on the plane, help select appropriately priced hotel rooms, book excursions/entertainment, clear their calendars of pesky interruptions and even get a passport. Ideally, you'll want to help all of the customers quickly, as the faster they are served, the more their excitement builds and this translates to filling your bars up quicker.
Once you have booked enough trips for a particular destination, you select the Travel option and embark on mini-games at destinations. Things like preparing tropical drinks, dragging clients to beach chairs and pool rings, or flipping them over while they tan, and even retrieving sand dollars and shells, in the Mayan Riviera, Hawaii and Brazil; serving them delectable meal courses in New York, Italy and Paris; helping them take picture-perfect sightseeing photos of the area and of themselves in Niagara Falls, the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon, and helping them dance the day away on the deck of a cruise ship in the Galapagos Islands, the Caribbean, and Venice. If you aren't speedy enough during the mini-games, you can lose customers. If you lose three customers, it's mini-game over and you have to begin again. |
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Difficulty:
There are three difficulty levels to choose from in Jet Set Go: Beginner, Casual and Expert. Beginner and Casual seemed pretty similar to me, except that perhaps the customers were slightly more patient in Casual. Expert requires tighter gameplay and customers lose patience much more rapidly. In the mini-games, some of which remind me a lot of Diner Dash, you can't purchase any upgrades so that you serve customers quicker, so it is up to you to properly queue up your tasks and to multi-task as much as possible. I did encounter times were I couldn't get my swipes on the iPad to register and these happened most often on the tropical drink preparation screen and when I needed to take a picture in the passport area or at sightseeing destinations. I don't think my gestures were read as accurately as they were on some of the other places on the game, which led to frustration. Basically, there was a sweet spot and once I learned exactly where to swipe, it was much better. But as my customers' patience dwindled while I searched for the correct spot, it wasn't much consolation.
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Game Mechanics:
I've been playing time management games for quite some time now, but when I started playing them on the iPad, it was as if a light was turned on and the angels started singing. The iPad is the ideal way to play time management and Jet Set Go only serves to reinforce that idea.
Everything is done by tapping or finger swipes on the touch screen. Once you select an agency (and once you have unlocked all three, you can go back and replay areas), the interface will present you with the three bars to fill: Excitement, Appeal and Satisfaction. Whichever area has the lit indicator next to it is the one you need to play at that time. When you select Play from under Excitement, you'll go to the agency and begin booking trips, etc. You'll start with only one red chair for customers to browse brochures and two blue chairs to book trips. For the brochure chair, you'll actually have to tap them and stand there while they decide what they want to do next. Eventually, through upgrades, you can have a chair that allows them to make decisions on their own, once you bring them the brochure. For the trip chair, you'll see the client's face and as you scroll through possible destinations, their expressions will be happy, mad, indifferent, or thrilled. Picking the destination with the happiest expression yields the most excitement and money.
Eventually, you'll be able to have green chairs and purple chairs. The green chairs allow you to help a customer by clearing their calendar of annoyances during their trip week. This is presented as a slide puzzle, where the red blocks are the problem areas and you must slide them out of the vacation week. This was a fun little puzzle. Next, you can help them obtain a passport and to do this, you slide your finger across the top to close the curtain and then slide your finger up/down the right side to focus then camera, then snap the perfect shot. The purple chair allows you to help them select the right price for hotel rooms and functions the same as when picking trips; look for the happy face. When booking excursions and such, the client will have the icon of a certain type of entertainment option next to them and you have a board with many icon choices. Select the matching one to complete the task. You can print tickets for customers by dragging them to the machine and doing it for them or, through upgrades, you can get self-printing machines, which speed things up.
The one thing I found really aggravating was in the Upgrades menu; there were two or three different assistants to obtain that would help you at the different stations, but instead of allowing players to purchase them, you could only gift them to three friends and then get yours for free. That's a wonderful concept and all, but I don't have any friends who play time management, so I was just up the creek without a paddle. ...Or an assistant. I would have preferred both the option to buy the assistant and to gift/receive them. Perhaps they'll make a patch to offer this option at a later date.
Lastly, there are a number of achievements you can earn in Jet Set Go, my favorite of which comes from preparing a certain number of tropical drinks. This is accomplished by swiping your finger across a coconut to open it, and then sliding your finger to dispense the frosty green drink into the empty coconut shell. The achievement? Well, "Fruit Ninja", of course. The gestures for the other mini-games ranged from tapping to deliver drinks, food items and seashells, to tapping someone who needed to be flipped over on their mat and then swiping your finger in a circle to match the arrow on screen. The dance mini-games had you tapping a certain colored arrow when it slides from right to left and appears in the center of a target. It was very Dance Dance Revolution, just not with your feet. The sightseeing destinations had you drag clients to stationary binoculars and help them find the perfect view. You could also drag them to the stationary camera and, much like taking passport pictures, line up the shot so it is in focus, then take the shot.
Overall, I really enjoyed Jet Set Go, but it was over all too fast. Since there are only three agencies, I whizzed through them in a couple days, but there are spots for more agencies with the promise of adventures to come. If you like time management games, you should definitely check out Jet Set Go. There's a lot of attention to detail in this game and it's a real blast. |
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-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins |
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