Arcade Review: New Dave & Busters Buffalo, NY location

Recently I had the opportunity to visit the newly opened Dave & Busters location located in the Walden Galleria Mall in Cheektowaga, NY. This location is just referred to as the Dave & Busters Buffalo location as Cheektowaga is simply a suburb of Buffalo, NY. D&B formerly operated in the Eastern Hills Mall in Williamsville, NY which isn’t that far away from the new location. I would assume they moved to the Walden Galleria as it’s a much larger mall than the Eastern Hills, and they will obviously get more foot traffic and business being in one of largest malls in the area. In addition they are also now located closer to the busy metropolitan areas and area colleges which will equal more business.

D&B is located in the newest section of the mall, surrounded by many other restaurants and stores, so naturally this location will feel very bright, new and clean. When D&B first came to our area in 2005 I was a little let down by the location, it wasn’t anything special or better than any other arcade I have seen in the past, and the service was pretty bad, and I was always finding out of order games.

However within the last 5 years something has changed drastically. Even at the old location, I started seeing more newer machines come in, instead of the same ones they had forever. They started to advertise that they had the latest arcade games on TV, which is something I wouldn’t expect an arcade to do in this day and age. The location started to see a lot of improvement. Rarely was a game found that was not working. Foot traffic started to pick up, and more people were clearly spending money there.

This new location is even better, its larger, newer and has all the latest games you would expect, like Star Wars Battle Pod, Angry Birds Arcade, Transformers Human Alliance and Jurassic World. As I mentioned before, its clean, well done, and all of the machines work perfectly. I don’t have any complaints about it at all. The redemption counter has been overhauled and more prizes have been brought in. There is now a full-service restaurant area where the old location just had a few stools and tables and of course the bar. They also have a new parents lounge, a quiet place where parents can sit and relax while kids play the games.

D&B uses a swipe card system for all their games, you can buy a card at the counter or at one of the kiosks in the arcade. Games at least in Buffalo range from about 3 points for a single play on a candy claw machine to 15 points for some of the bigger games like the Star Wars Battle Pod. The Eat & Play combo is 16.99 for an entree and a $10 game card. My advice if you are going to spend some time at D&B is to sign up for their rewards program and use their coupons to maximize the value you get out of your visit. The eat & play combo is your best bet if you want to eat there. I haven’t personally eaten there yet so I cannot comment on the food, but the new restaurant area is very nice.

Here are a few pictures of the location:

This is an overall shot of part of the arcade and their Super Trivia machine:

Buffalo has two Time Crisis 5 machines

A Deadstorm Pirates Special Edition back-to-back with a Jurassic Park