Mobile gaming started with Snake. It's certainly come a long way in a relatively short period of time, but there's no denying that back in the day, before mobile gaming or even text messaging was all the rage, Nokia's Snake was king. It wasn't much to look at, and it was almost painfully simple, but Snake ran smoothly at multiple speeds and, well, it was great at making your wait for the train seem a lot shorter. Much time has passed since Nokia put Snake onto its phones, and now San Diego-based developer Entelepon is trying to take the concept to the next level with its new take on the game, simply titled Multiplayer Snake. While the name isn't a lie--the game is most certainly a multiplayer version of Snake--some performance issues and a general lack of variety prevent it from reaching its potential.
There are two gameplay options in Multiplayer Snake. You can either play online or play offline. On paper, the two games are roughly identical, but offline mode puts you up against artificial intelligence-controlled opponents, while online mode lets you play live against other players. The concept is the same as it has always been: You control a snake and must attempt to eat food (in this case, golden mushrooms) in order to score points. Each time you eat something, your snake grows a bit longer, making it harder to avoid crashing into your own tail or other obstacles, which ends the game. Multiplayer Snake also adds some power-ups to the arena. One lets you drop eggs in your wake to make life harder for the other snakes. Another lets you flip directions completely, moving your head to where your tail was and vice versa. This is incredibly useful for getting out of otherwise deadly spots. In single-player mode, speed-up icons also appear, letting you speed up the action if you so desire, which is nice, because the game starts out at a very slow pace.
In online mode, the game automatically searches for other players and connects you to a game. If no players are found, you're dumped into an online game against AI snakes, which are fairly dumb. You'll often find them just running into their own tails long before any of the snakes get long enough to make the game challenging. Unfortunately, the game's challenge comes from its general feeling of sluggishness. The game isn't terribly responsive to button commands as it is, and taking the game into online mode magnifies this problem quite a lot. In an attempt to make up for this, online mode lets you buffer your moves a bit, but this has the side effect of letting you essentially boost your speed at any time, which is something the AI snakes simply can't deal with, so you can box them in very easily.
Perhaps a larger problem for the game in both modes is that as the snakes get longer, the game's performance gets choppier. This makes an already stuttery game slow down even further. Even the music takes a speed dive when things get really active onscreen. Considering that the timing of your turns is key to survival once the snakes get long, this makes the game feel almost unplayable in spots.
Graphically, Multiplayer Snake does a good job of conveying the action. While it may not be as pretty as Splinter Cell or some of the other graphically lush mobile games currently on the market, the snakes look good, and the collectible items stand out from the background pretty well. You can customize your snake with three different colors, which can be helpful for keeping track of your snake in longer matches. You can also change your snake's name and customize a handful of macros for use as taunts during matches.
On the sound side of things, Multiplayer Snake is limited to a few different tunes that play randomly during matches. While the tunes are appropriately upbeat and fit with the game, they behave strangely during the game. Songs will suddenly stop and start for no good reason or change rapidly from one to the next without warning. We also experienced a few instances when, after playing a few games, the sound would cut out altogether, forcing us to quit and relaunch the game to get the music back.
Snake is a solid concept. It always has been, all the way back to the days of the arcade version of Tron or the Atari 2600 game Surround. In theory, Multiplayer Snake is a big step in the right direction. In practice, however, the changing game speed and sluggish controls make it more frustrating than fun, and it's perhaps better suited for a temporary download than as a permanent fixture on your phone.
