Azure Snake (Wii U)

Snake must be one of the most reproduced and copied game types to exist even though its popularity really can’t be traced back to one monumental title. In fact, the first game to feature the style of play associated with the name, Blockade, didn’t even reference snakes in its gameplay. However, with the many clones available through a variety of means, to draw attention to your version would require some sort of alteration to the formula, a gimmick to set it apart from an overpopulated crowed. In Azure Snake, that difference is that the snake you play as… is blue.

Jokes aside, Azure Snake does contain a small departure from the formula a Snake game usually uses. Most of the typical elements are there; the player guides their initially short blue snake around the boxed in play area, collecting the green orbs with their head wherever they might appear. Every time your snake gobbles up one of the randomly appearing objects, its body grows longer, the tail dragging behind it as a trail marking where you have been previously. The snake moves forward automatically, the player only guiding it by turning it around with the four directions of the Wii U’s D Pad. Play will go on until the snake collides with the boundaries of the play area, but these failure conditions are actually where Azure Snake departs from its genre brethren. One of the key elements of Snake is that your ever expanding body becomes a hazard in itself, your run also ending if you crash your head into your constantly lengthening body. However, Azure Snake completely removes this element from play, only the edges of the screen being deadly and giving you the ability to freely cross over your dragging tail. In fact, you are even able to do an immediate about face by pressing the opposite direction of your movement.

While this design choice isn’t totally unique to Azure Snake, it is undoubtedly its defining feature. Your tail here, rather than being an obstacle you need to accommodate, is now technically just a marker of where you’ve been, but there is actually still a problem caused by your ever-growing body. Azure Snake is happy to make each green circle chomped expand your body quite a bit, and this is because your body isn’t a physical hazard but instead a visual obstruction. If an orb appears in an area where your body is, it can be completely hidden from view, the player having to guess where it might be by moving around the play area their body has covered up. Considering just how large you can easily get since your automatic movement is pretty manageable, the entire play area can soon be filled with your glowing body that really seems more of a cyan in color than azure. This twist on typical Snake play unfortunately doesn’t amount to much because there is very little pressure on the player save when the orb potentially appears right next to the borders of the play area. In fact, the only danger present is that you might not turn in time while grabbing an orb on the edge, the game having a huge issue in its incredibly low difficulty level.

Azure Snake is a game about trying to get new high scores, points being awarded for each orb eaten and play ending the moment your head makes contact with the borders of the screen. However, during regular play, there is technically no reason you should ever touch those borders, even if you have reached a point where your body is so long the entire play field has gone from the randomly selected bright backgrounds to just your long blue trail. Because you can pass over your body without any punishment, it quickly becomes apparent that there is no issue with you simply spinning in a small circle, piling up your body into one small area to remove the visual pollution. Since every bit of forward movement causes the end of your tail to start uncovering ground it was obscuring, you can gradually get everything in one tight bundle and then continue to play normally, grabbing orbs until you need to repeat the tactic again. Or even worse, you can just play normally and hope you’re grabbing the orbs despite not having a good view of things. Either way, no matter what high score you end up setting whenever you end your run, either out of getting sloppy or just getting bored of a gameplay style that quickly grows rote, you’ll always know you could have likely done better if you had just sat in place for a while and coiled your blue body into a more manageable pile. The points are essentially meaningless because of this tactic’s unpunished existence, and the game almost has no answer for it.

As you play Azure Snake, you begin very slow and gradually gain a bit more speed as you eat more and more orbs. The speed will eventually plateau at a pace that, while not slow, is easily handled, but that is only on the default settings. Although the game doesn’t even indicate it exists, there is a pause menu where you can alter certain aspects of Azure Snake, some just cosmetic like the color of your snake’s head and others having a clear impact on play like the starting speed of the snake. At 4 times speed the snake is actually a bit more difficult to control and even has the same gradual increase before it plateaus, meaning that on this hardest mode, you can actually lose control of the snake and fail for a reason beyond a slowly growing apathy. The orbs on the edges do become more legitimate hazards, and while the coiling strategy is still effective, this setting barely pulls Azure Snake out of being just an absolutely awful adaptation of this fairly simple gameplay style. It’s definitely not enough to undo the problems with a game that still hinges too much on visual noise than legitimate challenge, but adding in that small need for quick reaction times prevents it from being a game with almost no strategy or skill requirements.

THE VERDICT: Azure Snake’s alteration to the Snake game formula almost completely obliterates any challenge in the game, the fact your body is a visual obstruction rather than a deadly blockade leaving the game with very little room to threaten the player. The natural speed of the snake is far too low to be worried about and points are too easily earned with boring but efficient tactics, but the menu that allows for slightly speedier games just barely produces a mode where there is a slight challenge beyond trying to remain interested in an incredibly dull iteration on a very straightforward gameplay concept. Relying on easily overcome visual pollution for the most part, Azure Snake still doesn’t have anything really interesting to draw in players, but perhaps that’s not too surprising since it’s name seems to be marketing its coloration as its most significant change to the all too common video game concept.

And so, I give Azure Snake for the Wii U…

A TERRIBLE rating. If not for that 4 times speed setting, Azure Snake would be a game that is completely solved. No other speed setting really reaches the point where you can’t execute the coiling tactic almost flawlessly, and those orbs near the edge are never common enough to make the borders a constantly encountered problem. Snake on its own is most often the kind of game you already play idly, with a finite point where the run has to end as your body grows too cumbersome to maneuver around safely. However, there is a challenge to keep that expanding body growing in a way that can be safely navigated around, and removing that element leaves hardly anything left to contend with. Azure Snake’s tries to replace it with the confusion of your overly long glowing cyan body filling so much of the play area, but it allows you to just pile the body up where it won’t cloud your vision anymore, rendering that almost entirely moot if you are willing to put in the time to execute the tactic. A high score is pretty much meaningless once you know this boring but effective method for achieving it, but at least at its absolutely highest speed setting, Azure Snake does provide one where it is slightly likely you’ll lose despite it still being pretty dull and repetitive.

There are so many version of Snake in the world, some as easy to play as typing Snake into Google. They’re in other major games, provided for free on many phones, and even properly altered in interesting ways in other titles. Azure Snake was going to have a hard time standing out even if its new idea did work, but the formula is so dull and easy without that threat of crashing into your own body. If it had added something new to replace what it removed perhaps it would be worth a look, but instead, it can’t even claim to just be Snake but blue since it’s so much worse than its incredibly simplistic inspiration that it couldn’t even copy properly.