For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Snaky Cat, from developers Appxplore on my iPhone 14 Pro.
I grew up during the heights of Snake on mobile phones so i was instantly curious to try out a new take on the genre. The app store page does a good job of selling what the game has. But when i played Snaky Cat it felt like the game itself does a poor job highlighting the cool aspects of gameplay.
It starts off so well with a cool little video. but after that, there seems to be no fun cat stuff to the game besides getting new ones to use and using accessories. for example, there's a cat in the middle of the home screen but nothing happens when you touch it. the food to collect isn't cat themed either. it feels like cats were chosen because they're popular but as the game doesn't lean into it the main animal could be anything.
The tutorial is the same. it starts off being very helpful but doesn't teach us crucial gameplay mechanics. i have a couple of examples for this. as i'm someone who played the original Snake, one of the biggest rules was that you couldn't touch your own body. for most of this video, i was playing by that rule as i didn't know otherwise. it wasn't until i saw someone else touching their own body that i guessed that critical rule no longer applies. The other gameplay mechanic that's not revealed is how the boost works. it took me 7 or more games before i realized how it worked. the boost is powered by how many doughnuts we have eaten. the more we eat, the longer we get and the higher our total score is. but when you use boost, your using your score and your cat is shrinking in size. it's one reason it took a while before i started to get decent scores.
What frustrated me the most playing Snaky Cat was the advertisements. many games have them and i have no issue with some of them. but in Snaky Cat, the first advert came before i knew the value of the items being sold. it's a mistake that happens often, but what most games do now is let you touch or long press on each item to learn about them. But the biggest frustration came with the intrusive adverts. after about 25 minutes, or so, when i went to start a match, the game would launch an advert without my permission. i do these videos on wi-fi so there's no data cost to me. but for those playing on their network, these video adverts slowly eat into your data. playing Snaky Cat showed me that there get's to a point where you'll be watching one of these videos before each match. if you're not careful, it slowly eats into your data cap.
The basic gameplay idea behind Snaky Cat is solid and, from a nostalgic point of view, it was nice playing a Snake style game again. but the game as it is, this close to it's worldwide launch, isn't good enough for me to recommend. the adverts are a part of it but it's also the poor tutorial/unexplained game mechanics, and ultimately the gameplay loop came across as very simple and repetitive. many games have more unlocks or longer stories, or someone to vary up the gameplay over time. Snaky Cat needs something like the random level modifications that Squad Busters uses to help keep things fresh.
Version 1.0.2 Played.
