Review: Dave and Buster's Roblox World - Fun but Flawed

As the amount of players and demographic of Roblox rapidly expands, companies have begun creating their own games in attempts to connect with consumers on a more personal level. The most recent company to dip their foot into the metaverse (or rather meta-galaxy) of Roblox was none other than the arcade game giant themselves, Dave & Buster’s. As someone who spent way too much time in National Geographic’s Animal Jam arcade as a kid, I decided I was qualified enough to test out and review this branded experience.

After a clean intro displaying the outside of the building and the Dave and Buster’s logo, your avatar is placed in an arcade decked out with various machines and a restaurant. The arcade is actually just a lobby, where you wait to play three multiplayer mini-games. Unfortunately, you can’t truly play any of the arcade machines that are displayed, which was highly disappointing. To play, you simply click a “Ready” button and then vote on one of three minigames to be played next.

The first mini-game I played was Zombie Survival. It was a stationary fps game where you click to shoot zombies, and gain points accordingly. I really enjoyed this one because I loved the atmosphere, and it was a perfect balance of scary and fun.

The second mini-game is Superball Dash, where your avatar is put in a giant hamster ball and you have to race to the finish line. Overall, this one is comparable to bowling with the bumpers up. Even though it’s “fast paced” there’s not much you can do besides follow the path.

The final mini-game I played was Arcade Run, which was a good three minutes of hell. Dave and Buster’s attempted to create an obstacle-course style game like Fall Guys, which did not translate well to Roblox. Roblox can be very glitchy sometimes in terms of players getting stuck between entities (especially moving ones) and this game had many moving parts. Overall this mini-game is frustrating and almost impossible.

After playing these three games, I had over 1,000 tickets and I was excited to spend them just like at a real Dave & Buster’s. Unfortunately, the cheapest item was 7,500 tickets, meaning I’d have to play about another twenty rounds of the three mini-games, just to get the cheapest item.

Dave & Buster’s World has accumulated around 1.27 million visits as of now, and has a 94% rating on Roblox, which is fairly high for a branded game.

Overall, Dave & Buster’s World fell short of my expectations. It’s a fun game and definitely one of the better branded games, but failed to fulfill a lot of the potential it had. Typically, I go to an arcade for single-player, usually chance-reliant games. This Roblox game was filled with multiplayer, skill-based games. This is just another example of something I often find when brands create Roblox games: a disconnect between the actual brand and their final game.

If you plan to bring your brand to Roblox, do not sacrifice your brand for player engagement. Research the popular games (which we outline at the top of every one of our bi-weekly newsletters), stay true to your brand, and create incentives to make players come back everyday.