Dice Diving is a new release from Larry Snyder that cleverly combines elements of dice, poker, and high diving into one innovative iPhone app. While the concept sounds strange, the unique gameplay and varying level goals add up to a surprisingly enjoyable game.
Dice Diving Pros:
- Unique game style
- 31 Levels of varying challenges
- Easy learning curve thanks to included demo video
- Ability to satisfy poker, dive, and diving enthusiasts alike
Dice Diving Cons:
- None as of this review
The premise of Dive Diving is to form poker hands by rolling five die in hopes to score the highest hand possible. There are no other players to match wits, of bluffs with, but instead judges are present to score your hand after each roll. While judges’ scores are based on poker hand values, players must also meet dive requirements. How so? Within each “Challenge” the player must perform an “Approach,” “Flight,” and “Entry” made up of key dice rolls. For example, the Approach might require a set of three 4’s, the Flight demands a run of 5’s, and the Entry needs a sum of 20 or more. Each dive category gets one or more rolls to complete and is weighted with a point value. These point values are then added together and multiplied by the sum of the three highest judge scores. Sounds confusing doesn’t it? Thankfully Larry Snyder has embedded a fantastic demo video as the instruction set. We’ve included the video below. After watching it, players should have no problem understanding the game and will be having a blast in no time. Upon completion of a particular dive, the players final score will be uploaded to a global leaderboard and their rank will be displayed.
Visually, Dice Diving is nice looking but doesn’t give a huge “Wow” feeling. The main screen presents buttons for beginning a new game, options, and local stats. Player’s locally saved stats can be emailed to friends taunting them to beat them. The options screen allows for turning on and off sounds effects, an ambient rushing water sound, online score upload, and access to the video demo. The second page of the options screen sports a nice cheat sheet showing poker hand values. Once a player begins a new game, the Challenges screen appears showing 31 dives in all. Most dive sets are initially locked and can only be accessed by completing the preceding five dives. Completed dives can also be replayed. Larry Snyder gave the individual dives great names like “Boat Galore,” “Triple Threat,” and Monster Five,” to give a few examples. The great thing is that each dive requires a different Approach, Flight, and Entry so the first run through won’t get repetitive. Replay value also shines thanks to the random dice rolling aspect.
We hope to see more game style ingenuity like this in the App Store. The developer took three elements, dice, poker, and diving and blended them into a successfully entertaining app that we never saw coming. After learning the ropes in the demo video, we think Dice Diving will hold the interest of any gamer like it has ours. We award Dice Diving a 1, 2, and 2 roll to make 5-Dimples.
Note: At the time of this unbiased review, Larry Snyder was one of our sponsors.
