WILDSNAKE

When we told our wife we were playing WildSnake, she asked us which clone of Big Boss that was. Had to share that. You may look at the box art for this game and assume, like we had, that it’s one created by Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov but no! No, not at all! In the manual, game concept is accredited to Alexey Lysogorov at J.S.C Gamos. Pajitnov’s name was just slapped on by the publisher, Bullet Proof Software, who had close ties with the man after their founder Henk Rogers.. Well, that’s a story for another day.

So, what is WildSnake (all one word.) Well, it’s a game where snakes fall from the top of the screen and eat each other. That’s it. Go for a high score and try not to top out. The way the snakes fall is incredibly satisfying, you can press down to ‘soft-drop’ them until they hit an object or another snake, but you can control their direction the whole way down to fit them into nooks and crannies. Just letting them flow on their own is rather nice too, how they cascade down the bodies of other snakes into recesses, where they then keep flowing after more space has been cleared. Also, when you eat a snake you can briefly see its skeleton. Fun.

There are snakes of all different colors and patterns, which though the Super Game Boy enhanced version our emulator ran makes easy to comprehend, it was also fairly readable on a monochrome GB Pocket. Snakes eat other snakes of the same pattern/color mix, points are awarded based on the length of snake that was eaten. As the game goes on more patterns are introduced, We think there’s about ten in all? Naturally in the home console versions these are just differently colored instead of differently patterned. There’s also a flashing snake that’ll clear all snakes of the first color it lands on, and a chunky snake that falls straight down and eats all in its path.

It’s an incredibly basic game engine, there’s no combo system for when snakes cascade on each other after one clears the way, it’s always points based on length of snake eaten with no multipliers for combos. And there’s no high score leaderboard either, the game only saves one high score. Funny enough the game resets every time you lose, which isn’t noticable on an actual Game Boy but incredibly noticeable on a Super Game Boy, where the outside border fades to black and reappears. Takes ages. There’s also only one song per game mode that gets grating fast, with no option to turn it off, which sucks. As you’d expect it’s an Arabian style snake charmer song in the main mode and something a bit nicer, but still repetitive in King Cobra.

Where it makes up for the rudimentary gameplay are in its variations. You can play the game at different speeds, in different shaped stages, and with obstacles appearing and/or dissapearing on screen. There’s also a challenge mode, accessible by setting the difficutly to King Cobra. Here, you’re challenged to eat X number of snakes in a certain time frame, or eat eggs that match the color of a plain snake. We find it odd that you need to qualify before each challenge by just playing the normal game. Being a Suepr Game Boy game theres a splash more color, plus fun borders around the screen which you can see peeking on the bottom edge of our screenshots. It doesn’t block any gameplay thankfully.

Wildsnake is such a basic game, there’s almost nothing to it. There’s no combo system and fighting for a high score feels a bit foolish and the music is annoying, but it has that same Tetris feel to its gameplay, and it’s addicting! We had trouble putting it down to write this review. It’s certainly one we’ll come back to for more snakey fun every now and again, but may not play for more than twenty minutes. There’s too many other addicting puzzle games out there to play. Wildsnake is about tied with Zoop in terms of our enjoyment, but Wildsnake is gonna take the top spot for all of its variations and customizable features despite having slightly worse presentation.