Project Snaqe is a retro style arcade game that is a take on the classic “snake” genre, which dates back to the 1976 Gremlin made arcade game Blockade. The idea behind snake is an ever-growing chain that gets longer each time the snake (player) “eats” a new chunk of something. The player must navigate the snake to the next meal and avoid trapping himself or crashing onto a wall or obstacle.
In the case of Project Snaqe, the snake is a growing chain of cargo wagons towed behind a vehicle that can drill or shoot. Drilling is used for randomly appearing nodes of rock, and shooting is used for any other objects or creatures that the drill doesn’t work on. Drilling and shooting are mutually exclusive, the player must “convert” from one mode to the other. In shooting mode, it is possible for the player to shoot his own wagons, blowing them off the chain. This means that the snake can be kept perpetually small.
The graphics are pixelated to about circa 1990, maybe a bit earlier. The presentation is reminiscent of an arcade classic that has been converted to a PC of that era. The sound and music are reasonable, a bit of the Deus Ex theme came to mind in the music. The controls are a bit of a sore spot; they are fixed and cannot be remapped or changed. Also, any controller or joysticks plugged in may cause problems, for example a gaming throttle caused the mouse cursor in the game to not work until it was unplugged.
Ultimately, Project Snaqe is a technically sound game, but is it fun? No, not really. The game starts out way too fast paced for the beginner mode. The maneuvering controls are glitchy, and in a game of this pace they have to be rock solid. A compounding problem is the lack of any on-screen objective or instruction to finish a level. This makes a game where the player is frantically trying to understand what can be drilled and what cannot while zipping around a small playing field. The developers must have gotten so good while testing that they decided the game was too easy at a slower pace. The result is a game that could be fun, but will most likely frustrate players into quitting within a few minutes of playing. Not recommended for the average gamer; buy this only if looking for high difficulty right out of the box.
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Jacmac is an ancient gamer that loves open world, strategy, FPS, and tactical sims, but will play almost anything.
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