Snake it! 3D Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Snake gets given the 3D treatment.

There has been a recent trend to take what's a very good looking 2D game and release another version in 3D for higher end handsets. This happens with most driving games and now the effect has hit Snake too. I'm sure you all know what the game is about and I recently reviewed an updated version here.

But now we have SnakeIt 3D which is a bit of a strange game. The camera view starts off pretty close to Snake and thanfully you can zoom in an out with the up or down keys. Obviously when you are up close the action moves faster and you can turn quicker. But why you would want to play this close, I don't know and I found that I always played the game on the farthest view.

Not that I played the game for that long mind you. With the 3D element making it look much nicer (and the option of having different levels of graphics based on your phone - interesting to see the circular fruits becoming diamond shaped with the graphics set on low, apart from that I didn't notice much difference!) I was struck by the fact there was one background. And one stage. And one fence surrounding everything. This looks good at first but wears off pretty quickly so some variety would have been nice. And no sound either, which is a real shame.

Aside from the 3D graphics the game has changed slightly in that you have to eat coloured fruits to increase the size of your snake (no giggling please). The yellow, red, orange and even green fruits pop up randomly in the playing area and as you eat them, they appear in your tail. You get points by eating more than 3 fruits of the same colour then eating a fruit of another colour. It's only when you eat the fruit of another colour that you get the points and the fruits of the same colour disappear. Sound confusing? Well, maybe an example will help. If I have eaten 5 red fruits, I can keep on eating red fruits to increase my tail. But I won't get the points for all the red fruit I've eaten until I eat another colour, say orange, at which point the 5 red fruits disappear and now I'm left with one orange. So I should go around eating orange fruits, then another colour to make them disappear.

You should be able to get the hang of it once you play and the top right of the screen even tells you what fruits you have in your tail and how many you have of each colour. The interesting thing with this is that you can create chains by setting up the colours right as you need 3 or more for a chain. So if I eat 2 red fruits, 3 oranges, then another red, the last red will make the 3 oranges disappear, then it will join the first 2 reds, making another chain of 3. In this way you can make multiple chains and get more points. Or you can just have one giant chain of the same colour and then eat another colour to get the points. Luckily the potential points you get from a chain are noted in the points meter bottom left.

As you progress you will get more adept at getting points and your level will increase. Apparently there is an end level as you get an award for getting to it, but I never really bothered with this. There are other awards in the game, for making single colour chains of 10 or a certain number of chains, and even one for making a single colour chain of 150. With the limited playing area, I have no idea how it's possible to get this award. In fact, the limited playing area does bring the game down slightly in my opinion.

What also brings the game down are the controls. They just aren't that responsive (maybe it was my handset), and buffering moves doesn't work too well. It works if you have a wide view and you are wanting a very quick turn, but any other scenario and it takes a little bit of time for your move to register, making you have to anticipate when you want the button press. Some people may like this, thinking it forces a quicker reaction time, but I didn't care for it too much.

Apart from the awards there's a BIG emphasis on going online, creating a user account and checking out high scores. As well as uploading your high scores. And you can rate the game. And if you really want to, you can send people a link to the game by text. It seems the developers spent more time looking into promoting the game and establishing a community than the game itself. Because at the end of the day, this is just a limited version of Snake but in 3D. Whoop dee doo. Were it not for the coloured chain elements, this would have got a wooden spoon from me. As it is, there are much better 3D games out there.