Positives:
- Interesting innovation on the Platforming genre that controls well.
- Very characteristic and a beautiful game all around.
- There are enough checkpoints to reduce the frustration from failure.
Negatives:
- The novelty wears off too quickly, with little changes made to keep it appealing.
- Levels become very, very long and just drag on as a result.
- Minor camera issues.
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Snake Pass is an incredibly tough game for me to review because I am very mixed on it. On one hand I want to recommend it for the innovation it brought to the genre, and on the other hand, I want it to stay the hell away from me. That is a slight overexaggeration of course, but it's not too far from the truth. But let me begin by going into detail on what I like about Snake Pass.
Snake Pass is a charming platformer where one key feature is missing: jumping. Instead, you're a snake who gets higher up the stage by wriggling and coiling around wooden poles. Noodle is a long snake, so it is important that his entire body makes the movement to push him forward. This results in a physics-based game, and I can say that the controls are pretty good. The camera can sometimes be a hindrance though, but it happened only a select amount of times for me. Of course, it still revolves around physics which usually leads to frustration, and Snake Pass is no exception to that. The game gradually becomes harder, and deaths are becoming more and more frequent. Fortunately checkpoints are usually nearby more difficult sections so the reset is pretty much imminent.
But me throwing my controller through the room out of frustration is not the reason I partially dislike this game. That reason is simply because the novelty wears off really quickly. Pole climbing is the entire game, and it barely ever changes from that. Sure, it becomes more difficult, but a lot of it is still pole climbing. The only changes to the gameplay are some switches to use and a few stage hazards, and that's it. Is that an issue when the pole climbing itself is good? Not necessarily, but the levels themselves really begin to drag on the further into the game you are. They become very long, frustrating, and just very sameish. While the first few levels were all very fun because this idea was fresh and new, the later levels just weren't fun to go through. And we are talking about 3 to 4 hours of content here, not necessarily including completion. And besides, Noodle is just a very slow character to control, even when constantly wriggling to increase speed. If the gameplay evolved then I probably would have liked this game a lot more, but now? I can recommend it for two hours and that's it. But recommending a 20 euro game for 2 hours doesn't exactly sound ideal so I hate to say it but I'm sorry. I would love to recommend this for the concept alone, but I can't wholeheartedly recommend people to go out and buy it.
- Interesting innovation on the Platforming genre that controls well.
- Very characteristic and a beautiful game all around.
- There are enough checkpoints to reduce the frustration from failure.
Negatives:
- The novelty wears off too quickly, with little changes made to keep it appealing.
- Levels become very, very long and just drag on as a result.
- Minor camera issues.
-----------------------------------
Snake Pass is an incredibly tough game for me to review because I am very mixed on it. On one hand I want to recommend it for the innovation it brought to the genre, and on the other hand, I want it to stay the hell away from me. That is a slight overexaggeration of course, but it's not too far from the truth. But let me begin by going into detail on what I like about Snake Pass.
Snake Pass is a charming platformer where one key feature is missing: jumping. Instead, you're a snake who gets higher up the stage by wriggling and coiling around wooden poles. Noodle is a long snake, so it is important that his entire body makes the movement to push him forward. This results in a physics-based game, and I can say that the controls are pretty good. The camera can sometimes be a hindrance though, but it happened only a select amount of times for me. Of course, it still revolves around physics which usually leads to frustration, and Snake Pass is no exception to that. The game gradually becomes harder, and deaths are becoming more and more frequent. Fortunately checkpoints are usually nearby more difficult sections so the reset is pretty much imminent.
But me throwing my controller through the room out of frustration is not the reason I partially dislike this game. That reason is simply because the novelty wears off really quickly. Pole climbing is the entire game, and it barely ever changes from that. Sure, it becomes more difficult, but a lot of it is still pole climbing. The only changes to the gameplay are some switches to use and a few stage hazards, and that's it. Is that an issue when the pole climbing itself is good? Not necessarily, but the levels themselves really begin to drag on the further into the game you are. They become very long, frustrating, and just very sameish. While the first few levels were all very fun because this idea was fresh and new, the later levels just weren't fun to go through. And we are talking about 3 to 4 hours of content here, not necessarily including completion. And besides, Noodle is just a very slow character to control, even when constantly wriggling to increase speed. If the gameplay evolved then I probably would have liked this game a lot more, but now? I can recommend it for two hours and that's it. But recommending a 20 euro game for 2 hours doesn't exactly sound ideal so I hate to say it but I'm sorry. I would love to recommend this for the concept alone, but I can't wholeheartedly recommend people to go out and buy it.