Shot Bar For iPhone: iPhone Game Review

Shot Bar iPhone
Shot Bar [rating: 3.5/5]

Line up the glasses and pour away!

While a completely different barrel of rum fish to the previously reviewed Gourmania, I can’t help but draw comparisons to it with Shot Bar, instead of having a kitchen stacked with ingredients you have a bar with an unlimited supply of glasses and a series of bottles below it. Customers move into view and after a tap tell you what they want to drink.

Now it’s up to you to get the drinks ready, drawing out glasses with a swipe then dragging over a bottle and pouring it, simulated by tipping your iPod touch back and forth, then all you have to do is drag their drinks over to the customer and they are on their way rewarding you with points.

The better you do the more points you get as each customer has a gauge showing their patience and more points are awarded the more patience they have, but are removed if you make mistakes like dropping glasses, taking too long etc etc. Once you earn enough to hit the target, turning your timer green, you get moved onto the next level once you run out of time.

While graphics are strictly cartoon affair, with static customers and backgrounds, you’ll be far too busy pouring shots to notice. This must be one of those ‘all you can drink bars’ as you soon get swamped with customers wanting more drinks and this is the only way of adding complexity to the game.

Shot Bar iPhone Game

With 3 different styles of music which loops over and over, it soon drives you nuts and is only changeable by starting a new game/loosing your score.

I personally found this game a little hard with the tilt to pour action being alien to me but, with some time and practice I was pouring like a pro. Thinking about it though, shouldn’t the pouring action be side to side rather than back and forth to reflect the action on the screen? I also find drawing glasses out from the dispenser harder than it should be causing frustration on later levels when you start having lots of customers with large drink orders.

While not without it’s caveats ShotBar will, with a little more polish, be a fine addition to the serve ’em up puzzle genre in the near future.

Price: $0.99 as of 17/12/09 (iTunes Link)
Version reviewed 1.1

The Good

  • Unique twist on the genre
  • Makes use of multi touch…
  • …and accelerometer…

The Not So Good

  • …but can be tricky to get used to
  • Shot glasses hard to pull out

Reviewed by: @TylerDurdan

Shot Bar iPhone Game Video

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrYvvn5mURY]

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