Caterpillar Royale

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Caterpillar Royale is an Arcade-style game in the same vein as the classic games Snake and Tron, where you’re moving around a limited arena with an increasingly long snake trying to avoid running into walls or your own tail.

In this version of the game, those “snakes” come in the form of caterpillars, and in the place of the apples is… ugly green neon cubes. Yeah, it seems strange to copy the game Snakes and replace the apples, which snakes don’t eat but caterpillars do, with generic-looking green cubes, yet here we are, and this should give you an idea just how little thought or effort was put into this game’s visuals.

As for the gameplay, moving around feels all right, if a bit slow. However, this game fails when it comes to its three game modes.

In the first, players compete (and computer-controlled players fill the empty slots) to be the first to achieve a level-based goal, such as the first to collect a certain number of diamonds, or the first to grow their caterpillar to a certain length. Unfortunately, the penalty for colliding with anything in this game is to respawn your character reset back to their normal length (that’s right, this game with “royale” in the title can’t even do the “battle royale” mechanic right). This tends to result in smaller caterpillars dog-piling on the biggest one in kamikaze attempts to force them to crash, which defeats much of the game’s purpose if it’s often easier to take down opponents in a murder-suicide than it is to actually succeed.

The second game mode takes the core game’s mechanics and applies them to soccer…except these mechanics are poorly-suited to soccer, resulting in messy scuffles for the ball resulting in players repeatedly colliding out and then respawning back into the game.

The third game mode, and the only one that’s more or less functional, is simply navigating through a maze and being the first to reach a goal. It’s boring, and doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the gameplay of this game.

What’s disappointing is, the basic control mechanics of this game are just fine. If this developer had simply made the game this name implies, if they had made a version of Snake that works like a battle royale where the last one standing wins, that could have made for a fun take on a classic. Unfortunately, developers of Caterpillar Royale instead wasted the decent gameplay potential here on three game modes, two of which are fundamentally broken in their inception, and the third which is just plain boring.

tl;dr – Caterpillar Royale is an Arcade-style game that plays much like the classic games Snake and Tron. Unfortunately, while it controls well enough, the actual game mechanics aren’t a true “battle royale” game, and they work poorly for a Snake-style game, with three game modes that are all either broken or boring. Skip this game.

Grade: D+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Laziest Copycat

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