Snakeball Hands-on Preview

The mark of a good downloadable game has always been simplicity. From Geometry Wars on LIVE Arcade through to Calling All Cars on PlayStation Network, the best titles have always been the ones that barely need instructions or tutorials.

So delving into an early build of Snakeball, and its relatively lengthy introduction to the gameplay mechanics, it is easy to develop premature scepticism about the game. The main problem is that there are just so many elements from so many classic puzzle and arcade games crammed in, that there is immediately an untidy, cluttered feel to the gameplay.

The most obvious influence is gaming’s dirty little secret, and greedy destroyer of man-hours that is the original Nokia Snake; a mobile phone game that became a phenomenon. However, there are also elements of Super-Rub-Dub, Mercury, Action Loop, Super Mario Kart’s multiplayer battles, and even classic plastic board game Hungry Hippos.

The basic premise is a solid one; you steer a gliding hover board around a round arena, collecting up balls and dropping them through a hole in the floor as your rivals do the same. Each ball you collect joins your tail in a looping line behind you. If you should crash head-on into your own tail, or anyone else’s, you lose all your current collected spheres and go back to a respawn point.

So far I’ve described an interesting sounding mix of Snake and Super Rub-Dub, which would be fine, but there are so many other factors to take into account. To get score multipliers you must collect balls in sequential patterns of colour, which might be easy if it weren’t for the ‘Rainbow’ balls that affect their neighbours in your tail, and the bomb balls you can collect which start a self destruct timer that eventually counts down to your destruction.

Bomb balls can be fired out of your tail as a crude weapon, and ordinary balls can be hurled in the direction of destructible blocks in a similar way to Super Breakout, or flung towards a colour-coded goal. As well as hurling your own tail components, you can also collect weapons, from basic lasers to sideways firing blasts and looping cannons, with the latter two being among several that expect you to use Sixaxis to aim whilst juggling all the other rules and criteria of the game.

You don’t have to absorb this vast rule set to realise that for a small action-puzzle release there is a lot going on, without even mentioning your vehicle’s shield, the boost function, mines and enemies, warps and the guided missiles that you will sometimes need to steer for a period after they have left the screen.

The controls are rather unreliable on occasion, and counterintuitive at the opening stages of the game, when you need simplicity the most, and far too many buttons are used in a genre that usually prides itself on simple interface design. Yet there should still be some fun to be had amidst the chaos that is four friends all trying to compete together.

For a game flawed in so many ways by variation and complexity, it is a little ironic that Snakeball’s saving grace comes in the selection of game modes available. The main game consists of a genuinely well-considered selection of levels that provide enough different challenges at you to keep the game feeling fresh and keep you on your toes. You will face everything from warp-based puzzles to levels that require patience and cunning, and likely enjoy some a great deal.

The challenge mode is a one-player variation on the main game, with a little more space for cunning design, and the Ball Frenzy strips the game down to its fundamentals, which will be very familiar to anyone who has ever owned a phone like the Nokia 3210, as it is essentially a 3D, glossy realisation of Snake.

For now Snakeball has competent visuals and some fairly ordinary audio, but it is its mixture of both style and substance that make it as engaging as it is confusing, and as challenging as it is frustrating. Still, there is some time to go before release, so with a streamlined rule set and a little fine tuning throughout, PlayStation 3 owners may be able to look forward to an engrossing party game.