Long term readers of All About N-Gage will know that I am a big fan of the Snake game, and especially where Nokia have taken it , from the little bundled game on the Nokia 5110, through the release of Snakes for the original N-Gage, to the subsequent polish of the code for S60 3rd Edition devices (such as the N95). SO... the sight of Snakes Subsonic in the second generation N-Gage platform was like waving a vial of white powder at me.
The graphics and tweaks just looked fantastic, with more enemies crawling around the playfield, the spectre of an evil snake getting in your way, and the fact that this was going to be even more of a mind-bending playfield, with horizontal and vertical surfaces to climb through just adding to the visual fun.
And then I played it.
It’s just a horrible mess on top of a cracking game – because make no bones about it there is a great game here. Having taken the basic principle of ‘move around the grid and eat things’ of the pure Snake game, the arcade elements added in enhance the gameplay tremendously. The controls are still a relatively simple left and right, with the fire button to activate your pick-ups, back and forward to give a temporary boost or brake to the speed of the snake, and a key to toggle between the 3D and 2D (top down) view of the game. That’s it, and they are all very responsive – there’s little lag between the keypress and the action.
As you tour around the almost Escher-esque game world of walls, ramps, curves and tunnels, you can pick up the green power pills and a ‘bonus’ strip of blue pick-ups will then appear somewhere on the board. These are worth a lot of points, and multiply up if you can eat a whole strip without stopping – 10 points per square on the first strip, 20 per square on the next, 30, 40, and so on. Given that you’re looking to score a certain number of points per level (against the clock!), successfully navigating these strips is one of the major keys to getting past the later levels, especially once they start twisting and turning.
You’ve got speed up (and slow down) squares in addition to the temporary changes you can make to the snake, although these are usually in the most horrible places around the board, designed to disrupt any rhythm that you’ve built up in your mind to keep you on course, so you’ll need to be constantly focussing on the board, the environment, and where your snake is (and was, don’t forget your tail!). To add to the mix, in Snakes Subsonic you can go on the offence by picking up rockets to use against your opponents.
So where does it all go wrong?
That’s actually tough to detail, but let me try. For our American readers, it’s an Edsel; a clunker. There are so many tiny little things that are just not right, which mount up over time to just destroy any enjoyment of the game. For a 'pick up and play' title, where the first impressions and memories of the game are key to having you return, Snakes Subsonic just keeps presenting you with reasons to not pick it up.
Let’s start with the speed while playing the game – overall, it’s just too slow. I’ve always expected these arcade versions of Snakes to be fast, giving you just enough time to plan your next move, but not much more than that. Perhaps the clue was in ‘subsonic,’ because it’s certainly not Snakes Supersonic. With this slow speed, you might think this is because the rest of the play environment has a lot going on, and needs the extra processor time. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case either.
The frame rate seems low, to the point where it does visibly stutter on the screen (and this on the games-speedy N95), especially when you flip from one surface plane to another – when you make the transition, the whole play field rotates to keep the camera in the same relative position to the snake, which is the effect you would expect but it is comparatively lethargic and just feels clunky and poorly animated.
And finally, perhaps most frustratingly, there are numerous instances of pop-up. This is where items in the distance are not drawn until you get closer to them. So what looks like an empty playing field in Snakes Subsonic suddenly has a green translucent wall appear when you are 8 or 9 squares away from it. This is just frustrating and also really un-intuitive, because single items, power-ups and roving enemies are visible at a much greater distance. When you’re planning a route a few turns ahead, you don’t want to be thinking 'what if there’s a wall there I can’t see yet'?
There’s just no ‘slickness’ in the game play; it feels like Snakes by numbers, as if the programmers were doing their job, not because they loved it or truly believed in the project, but because they were getting paid to do it. Perhaps the change in developers from the first N-Gage developers Iomo to Barking Lizard has something to do with this? Whatever it is, there have been some amazing decisions in the design process on this title.
First you don't see it... now you do. Ouch.
There are also two idiosyncrasies in the game that really send me up the wall. First of all, and a really small but frustrating audio item for me, is that it’s impossible to switch off the background music but keep the sound effects playing – the volume control acts on all the sounds so you can have the full mix, or no mix at all.
Second is what happens when you die in a level. You get the death screen, one of your lives just pops out of existence (there’s no stylish fade over a second, just an instant delete as it slides to the centre of the screen)… and you get a loading screen! Nothing more than a pixel bar across the screen with ‘Loading…’ flashing out at you. I understand a long loading time for a new level, but to not have the starting state stored in memory for a quick restart, and instead asking the player in a ‘fast paced arcade game’ to wait a relatively long time to try again is an… ehrm… interesting design decision.
It pains me to do this, it really does, but I can’t recommend Snakes Subsonic. While there is a good, perhaps even a great game in here somewhere, it’s hampered by too many small failings, performance issues and poor design decisions that the game-play and intriguing 3D levels can’t overcome.
What I would recommend is to download the original Snakes game (available online and via the Download application on most devices) for your Nseries device. It’s free, fast, doesn’t have the faults on display here, and is playable and addictive. The biggest condemnation of Snakes Subsonic is that, to the untrained eye, ‘Snakes’ looks the sequel, not the 'merely updated for compatibility' three year old precursor.
-- Ewan Spence, All About Symbian, May 2008