Snakeball (PS3)
The idea behind Snake is as simple as it is addictive. Moving your snake around a small area, you aim to pick up dots to earn points, each one making your snake grow in length and your doom inevitable as your body becomes so long you’ll eventually crash into it. Turning Snake into a competitive multiplayer experience isn’t too much of a stretch either, but Snakeball seems to try and turn it into a full on video game sport. Some of Snake’s DNA is lost in the conversion though, but perhaps the strangest thing about Snakeball’s take on Snake is how it throws so many ideas at the wall trying to find the one that will succeed.
Snakeball’s core play is not a top-down 2D experience like Snake but a 3D game where you view your character from behind as they ride around an arena on an artificial snake. The snake itself is made up of little orbs, starting off rather tiny but able to grow in length by integrating the balls that start spawning in over the course of the match. Your goal isn’t necessarily to earn points by growing in length though as there are places you need to head to to turn in your balls to earn points either by passing over the goal or firing your balls into it from afar. Turning in a long chain or chaining together balls of the same color will earn you more points, but you can also accumulate score by attacking the small enemies that appear in the arena or even by destroying the opposing players.
A crash can lead to players dying and needing time to respawn and rejoin, but there are also weapons that allow for more aggressive play. Some are simple in concept like laser shots, but there are a few that involve using the PS3 controller’s motion controls to aim and it’s definitely awkward to line up a shot properly when a match involves constant movement and direction changing. Considering these include a powerful mortar and a guided rocket the imprecise controls are likely used to limit their effectiveness though, but the most interesting thing about weapons are how they play into the stage designs. Some levels are committed more to earning points through combat rather than collecting balls, others might fill the area with enemies or reshape the arena with barriers, and in general the default Snakeball mode’s ten flashy arenas all do try to provide a different experience from each other.
However, even when you’re utilizing your boost or encouraged to be aggressive, Snakeball can still be a rather slow game. Riding your snake around and focusing on ball collection rather than interacting with other players is perhaps too effective, and while you can play with other human players, the AI opponents don’t seem to glean how beneficial long term ball collection can be. Even with all the flashing lights to spice up the moments of interaction, Snakeball can be a bit too relaxed for its own good, the game not encouraging interaction with the enemy often enough to inject some excitement into the otherwise decent play.
If Snakeball isn’t clicking with you though, you can head over to Challenge mode where the mechanics of ball collection and turning them in at specific goals are reimagined as the means to play through 15 action stages. Since these aren’t competitive arenas the game is willing to get more creative with what it demands of the player. Enemy avoidance, speeding around enemies or level geometry, and collecting and turning in balls quickly are emphasized a lot more here and you even need to get through all the stages in a set amount of lives or you’ll need to retry the entire mode. Having to restart if you lose all your lives does kill some of this mode’s appeal unfortunately, many of the levels slow when you need to repeat them even though they do work fine enough when the stage’s concept was freshly introduced.
Challenge’s structure makes it hard to commit to seeing all 15 levels, but the focus on playing quick and properly makes for a difficult but varied way to play. Snakeball, while not discouraging passive play too well, has a good set of arenas to shake up how the game is played and you do need to play well to make sure you’re not outscored. However, our last mode, despite being the closest to the original Snake game in its design, is also the one that doesn’t really get to have any conditional praise attached to it. Ball Frenzy is Snakeball’s attempt to reproduce Snake in its 3D environments, so the goal is to eat up every ball you can while making sure you never run into your own tail as the available space starts to shrink. There are ten levels this can be played in, some simple and wide open while others like the tic-tac-toe shaped level or ones with many enemies will require you to weave around more and potentially doom yourself if you put your tail in your path by way of sloppy pathing. You do have a surprisingly maneuverable snake in all modes though, so even when things look hopeless you’d be surprised how many times you can turn on a dime and escape a collision.
Ball Frenzy’s idea isn’t bad, but its execution certainly is. The arenas the game takes place in, even when they’ve got more walls or odd geometry to try and make things more challenging, are simply too large. As you start playing you won’t really be at risk of hitting your tail at all, and the ramp up to your body actually being a danger is incredibly slow. The game does put multiple balls all around the arena and respawns them quickly so you can build yourself up at a decent speed, but it’s not fast enough to make getting to a level of tangible danger seem appealing. Long before you’ve hit that point the slow play will have worn down your patience with its stagnant loop of moving around and grabbing the same respawning balls and the fact the game makes the goal to reach 1000 balls in a level without dying just goes to show how far you can potentially get before things become absolutely untenable. Retaining a level of interest in Ball Frenzy mode for that long is difficult because of the repetitiveness and sluggish rise in difficulty, it definitely feeling more like a test of your attention span than any sort of skill.
THE VERDICT: Snakeball takes the classic game of Snake and rebuilds it into a technicolor sci-fi sport with differing levels of success per mode. The basic Snakeball mode can struggle to encourage player interaction and isn’t as energetic as its visuals imply, but it’s still able to remain competitive and winning relies on utilizing an arena’s gimmick and knowing how to best earn points. Challenge can be tedious to retry which doesn’t pair well with its difficulty, but the levels are all built well to test the mechanics in new and interesting ways. Ball Frenzy is the only write-off, the reimagining of Snake lacking the suspense and speed needed to make its long term ball collection goal worth investing your time in. Rather than letting Ball Frenzy’s failure weigh down the whole package though, Snakeball’s two other big modes still can hit the right notes just enough that the game can provide a bit of decent entertainment.
And so, I give Snakeball for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. Snakeball threw three big ideas for a Snake sports game at the wall and two of them sort of stuck. Ball Frenzy is the closest to its ancestor but it really needs that game’s speed or tight quarters to add some suspense to what can be an incredibly long play session, so it definitely was the mode that fell to the floor in this metaphor. The other two actually sort of hit on the same issue in that they hurt their game feel in some manner, Challenge and Snakeball mode both sapped of some of their energy by their structural choices. Challenge could have been a set of 15 interesting levels you play as you please, the game’s most creative concepts better able to shine if they’re a difficult challenge you need to overcome however you can rather than something you can only retry if you push through some slow early stages to give it another go. Snakeball mode could use the same shot in the arm Ball Frenzy needs, the speed of play a little too safe and the players not being encouraged enough in most cases to engage with the opposition. Certain arenas and weapon placement can draw out more direct competition, but Snakeball in general would benefit a fair bit from a big energy boost to make for exciting and dangerous fights where people wouldn’t be able to turn on a dime and avoid your attempted tail block or the like.
Snakeball does have online play, so the slow game speed might have been to prevent lag from killing the multiplayer experience. If things get choppy and you don’t have time to react to something potentially fatal ahead, Snakeball would conceivably become a fairly frustrating experience. Snakeball’s two successful modes feel like the last push to turn them into something truly good wouldn’t be too difficult, but even adding Ball Frenzy to the picture, it feels like Snakeball was on a course to a fun video game sport but didn’t quite get the balance right. For the most part it is an issue of game speed, but making the Challenge mode levels more easily available on top of a boost in energy to the main experience would allow Snakeball to show that its concepts really are good, they just weren’t hosted in the right way in the game we did get.