From the Minestrone Mines to Gumbo Grotto, Snack World
is an RPG universe entirely founded upon various types of cuisine. But
although this base is admirably creative, Snack World's failings
outweigh its strengths. Although it is conceptually innovative, the
execution never quite lives up to ambition.
Right from
the get-go, Snack World acknowledges the tropes it attempts to riff off
of. You awaken as an amnesiac hero, conveniently discovered just outside
the castle gates. You earn an audience with the king, who is
simultaneously jovial and relentlessly selfish, and he tasks you with a
variety of quests to satiate his daughter's fleeting desires--most of
which she no longer cares for by the time you retrieve your boon.
Once
you embark on an odyssey to regain your memory while becoming a
dungeon-crawling virtuoso, you're quickly bombarded with a hefty amount
of information tied to the game's various systems. Although they are
relatively straightforward and conventional--character traits, codex
entries, and opportunities for dungeon co-op--the explanations are
buried under esoteric apps on a phone-like device called a Pix-e Pad.
It's an interesting idea, but they're unnecessarily facetious, confusing
nuance with jargon.
Snack
World's dungeon crawling is more palatable. The environmental design of
areas like the Gorgonzola Ruins, which is presided over by none other
than the gorgon Medusa (spelled Madusa in Snack World), is inspired, for
example; serpentine statues denote dead ends, while torches bearing
green flame are arranged in puzzles that could summon either a chest or a
monster once solved. Strong environmental design exists outside of
dungeons too, with the game's third hub, Chowlin Temple, being
impressive in terms of scale and artistry--the massive golden dragon
sprouting out of the temple itself is a spectacle when you first
encounter it.
However, exploration of these environments
doesn't fare as well. They may look well when the game slows to a
standstill, but they're stunted by awful camera angles during actual
play--on one occasion you partake in an eight-person boss fight in an
arena barely bigger than a fridge. Meanwhile, Snack World's dialogue and
humor are the sort of thing that makes you go, "Oh, that's funny,"
without ever actually laughing, which is endearing in a sense but
becomes groan-inducing when "virtue" is still being emboldened as the
punned "virchew" 25 hours in.
Combat is clever and
intuitive, though, at least early on. Snack World considers weapons,
healing tonics, and utility colognes as "jaras," of which there are over
200. This allows you to create a variety of builds out of different
jaras, which keeps combat fresh and fluid. Unfortunately, the AI design
of your NPC companions is dodgy at best. On multiple occasions a
teammate stood next to me and simply refused to revive me, despite being
entirely safe to do so, triggering a quest failure and forcing me to
hack my way through the dungeon all over again.
About 10
hours into the game, the UI began to fail. I could access menus, but
numerical values had all but disappeared. I couldn't see weapon stats,
nor the amount of a certain item I owned. As a result, I couldn't
properly prepare builds for a game that is emphatically build-based.
Granted, there is an option for auto-selecting a loadout that is
specifically tailored towards whatever quest you're about to embark on,
but, most of the enjoyment comes from experimenting with new builds.
Dungeons
are further spoiled by their bosses. The majority are designed well, at
least in aesthetic terms--a pair of banshee sisters known as the
Bandshees are stylishly remodeled as the idolesque Godivas later in the
game, while Dullardhan the Headless Hackman channels massive Bloodborne
vibes. Unfortunately, many of Snack World's bosses are based on random
number generation that defeating them often boils down to sheer
stubbornness and sheer luck. One particular boss, Falgon, kills you in
one hit with an energy blast and, once he's at about 33% HP, spams this
attack like there's no tomorrow.
Snack
World also requires about as much grinding as an MMO without ever much
in the way of reward. The fact that level balancing is a tad confused
only accentuates this--I once completed a mission marked as level 47
while only at level 36 without dying a single time, but couldn't for the
life of me finish a certain level 40 mission while I was level 45.
Perhaps that's down to me being better suited towards one boss than
another--but, even if that's the case, Snack World still has trouble
articulating difficulty.
It's almost as if Snack World's
boss design was partially inspired by FromSoftware, but only in terms
of emphatic inspiration as opposed to iteration or even imitation.
What's worse, there is no shortcut to boss doors, nor an opportunity to
save outside them--you must traverse the preceding dungeon in its
entirety again, which begins to disrupt and destroy the decent
dungeon-crawling. As a result, despite the fact Snack World is initially
most exciting when you're exploring the depths of its dungeons, that
excitement is soon painfully wrenched into tedium. This phenomenon seems
to permeate Snack World in its entirety: although it's exciting and
captivating early on, each of its constituents become tedious before
long, and all of its strengths are weathered away by repetition and a
sense of feeling incomplete.
