Snakeybus

Genre: Driving / Arcade / Misc.

Players: 1, Online Leaderboards

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Digerati Best Sellers compilation, along with Slain: Back From Hell and Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition.)

Snakeybus is a game with a concept that’s both extremely silly and also kinda’ brilliant. It’s the sort of thing you can picture being dreamed up in a stoner haze: “Heyyyy man… you know that old game, Snake? Well, that if… like, that, but instead of a snake, you’re a bus that keeps getting longer, and instead of eating apples, you’re picking up fares. And, like, you could be in real-world locations. Oh, and your bus-snake has a jetpack so it can jump and stuff because the game is in 3D. And that way, you can, like, jump your bus over your own bus.”

So that’s basically Snakeybus in a nutshell. This game was originally released on PC in 2019, with the game releasing to consoles including the Nintendo Switch in 2020.

Graphically, this game is a mess. Despite having fairly simple visuals for the buses, the people, and the architecture of the locations you’ll be speeding through, this game suffers from terrible pop-in. The notion of thrilling at seeing your long tail twisting over the landscape is largely spoiled by this – your view distance is pretty terrible, and the pop-in becomes most noticeable when you can see the buses that form your tail constantly shuddering into view. As if this wasn’t enough, the Nintendo Switch version of the game also has some really nasty aliasing, making this whole experience something of a visual mess.

It’s not just the graphics where the game disappoints, either. In fact, the sound may be even worse. It’s not bad enough that this game’s music is the oddly subdued tones of what sounds more than anything like elevator music (seriously, who picked such boring music for a game with a wacky concept?), but this music drowns out the action on-screen. Even if you play around with the sound levels in menus, it never sounds quite right – the game has people screaming every time you barge through a bus stop, but this always sounds muffled, especially when this sound has to compete with others, like the sounds of your bus itself or the rain sounds in the Seattle location.

The technical flaws here extend to the gameplay as well. Simply controlling the direction of your bus feels oddly temperamental at times. In one particular level, I noticed that using the “accelerate” button caused the bus to buck like a bronco on a stretch of flat road. And it’s anyone’s guess how your bus will act whenever it jackknifes.

In addition, the jetpack “jump” runs on a meter that gradually refills, but sometimes even if you have some juice left in that tank it’s frustratingly non-responsive. What’s more, it often doesn’t act like you’d want, propelling you in an odd and unexpected direction.

On top of that, the level design here often leaves a lot to be desired. The real-life locations are actually the worst offenders here, with streets that seem far too busy and far too narrow. And heaven forbid you jump yourself into an area the game considers “out of bounds” causing you to automatically lose (these areas are of course not indicated to the player). The same goes with any water or bottomless pits. Oh yes, there are bottomless pits in some of the game’s maps.

Yet despite all of these problems, despite all of the shoddy graphics, the broken gameplay, the poor map design… despite having many of the hallmarks of a terrible game, Snakeybus still manages to be oddly compelling. This is largely thanks to the core concept, which is fun, and while the implementation here leaves a lot to be desired… a lot… the core concept is still so fun that even with all of this game’s flaws it still manages to be enjoyable.

I would love to see a more talented developer try their hand at the sort of game that Snakeybus is trying to be, because this really is a clever concept that’s a blast to play… when it works. However, this game is so shoddily constructed that even at its best, you often feel like you can see what this game could have been if it was put in the hands of someone competent enough to deliver on its core concept. However, in and of itself, Snakeybus still manages to be fun, even though it is absolutely riddled with flaws that drag down the experience, and if the opening paragraph of this review sounded appealing to you, you should definitely give this game a try. Just be prepared for that great concept to go hand-in-hand with frustration and disappointment.

tl;dr – Snakeybus is a game that takes the basic idea of the classic game Snake and re-imagines it as a game where you’re picking up and dropping off fares in a constantly-growing bus. It’s a silly but compelling concept, and it occasionally manages to be fun, but it is frequently brought down here by a huge laundry list of flaws that mar the experience and make it far less fun than it should be.

Grade: C

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