UPDATED with major fixes–vipValet: A car parking game that can be gamed.

I will admit that when I first launched vip Valet I rolled my eyes a little. The graphics were basic, the music was cheesy, and the premise left much to be desired. But after playing for a while, I came around. Somewhat.

The basic premise of the game is this: you are the head of a team of valet parkers. Cars turn into your lot and drop off people. It’s your responsibility to park the cars, and then pick up the customers when they are ready to leave.

You drive the cars by dragging them with your fingers, and you have a limited number of valets. Cars light up when you touch their corresponding owners, so you know which cars to drive around for pickup.

If people stand around waiting too long, they get annoyed. Game over. If you crash, people get furious. Game over. You can gage your effectiveness based on a sliding scale that goes from a smiley face to a frowney face.

If the meter moves completely to the frown…yeah…game over.

Based on that simple premise, the game works efficiently, and it actually can become quite addicting. Instead of points, you rack up cash. There are no levels or difficulty increases, though, and that’s one of the game’s major shortcomings. Instead, the thing turns into an endurance test as you try to rack up as much money as possible. It can get tedious.

The biggest flaw with the game, though, doesn’t rear its head until you’ve been playing for a while. There is no time bonus or penalty for taking a long time to park cars. That means that you can have a long line of cars waiting to be parked, but as long as your patrons are happy, there’s no danger of losing.

So in theory (and practice) you can just stop parking cars if the work load gets too high and wait for your customers to come out. The risk of crashes decreases, it’s easy to satisfy customers, and you slowly and surely rack up cash. In fact, you could get away with not parking any cars at all. Let one single car release its passengers, and allow the line to build up behind it (remember, there is no penalty for this). Then just wait for that patron to exit and easily pick them up. Make some cash and keep the customer happy.

Rinse and repeat.

You can see the design flaw here, no doubt. You can literally game the game, finding easy ways to rack up a score (slowly) without any real danger of ever losing. After a while, this becomes very tedious and boring.

The problem would be solved with a simple added penalty for having a long line of cars waiting to drop off patrons. If you have more than two or three cars waiting, your “customer satisfaction” bar SHOULD begin to drop, forcing you to park more cars…and making the game more difficult when the customers exit and await their automobiles.

(UPDATE: I was just informed by the developer that the newest update to the game fixes this flaw. I haven’t yet had a chance to check it out…if you have, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below.)

Besides that, the game is a bit buggy, creating scenarios where crashes stop game play and inserting crashes where none occurred. The latter happens often whenever the game is quit and resumed later.

Overall, it could be a good game, especially for $.99. Unfortunately, this big design flaw holds it back. Once you figure out how to game the game, the fun kind of goes away.

I apologize for this review being so clinical, but when there is such a clear and fixable flaw with an app, I feel the need to spell it out very logically. I’m hoping this one gets a simple update–and then I’ll no doubt revisit it and give it a rousing “thumbs up.”

You can buy vip Valet HERE.

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