In a world where snails are at risk of being killed by falling rocks and sunlight, who will save the snails? The answer is you, of course.
Save the Snails is a new, free game from Alda Games, a small, Czech game development studio. The game incorporates puzzles where in each level you’ll have to consider how to save your snail (or snails) from either falling rocks or the burning rays of the sun. You’ll be equipped with a rag-tag assortment of junk like matchboxes or pencils and it will be up to you to work out the optimal arrangement of all these implements to protect your snails.
There are 24 levels in the game currently, of which the first couple in the ‘Easy’ section are, as they say, pretty easy. Moving on to ‘Medium’, you’ll find that the difficulty ramps up quite a lot more and will require more than just one lackadaisical attempt to complete the level. The levels are thoughtfully designed with rudimentary chain reactions and the like, however if there’s one criticism to be made, it seems like quite a lot of the levels only have one way to complete them. Conversely, though, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as each level will have a clear solution, but it doesn’t exactly inspire one to be too creative with the puzzles.
Much like Angry Birds, there are a maximum of 3 stars able to be acquired for that level, but rather than just based on one statistic, each star is tied to the completion of a certain thing, such as dropping all your equipment within a certain amount of time, collecting the stars and, of course, saving the snail. As you’d expect, the early levels will yield three stars quite easily, but as you move onto the hard ones, you’ll be hard-pressed to get all the stars as the margin for error will be significantly less.
Save the Snail is presented in a cartoon-style which is very easy on the eyes; colours are nice and bright, and everything in the game is well drawn. Unfortunately there’s no music to speak to accompany the cute graphics of Save the Snail; there are basic sound effects, but they seems to be jarringly loud and unvaried; for instance, the snail will say “Uh oh!” whenever the rocks or sun rays are about to arrive, and when you get to the harder levels and have to restart it for the umpteenth time, the same sound clips can get a little grating.
Save the Snail is a nice, simple game, and the 24 levels included in the game should keep you busy for a few hours; hopefully there will be updates in the future to add more levels to the game. It’s not rocket science, and it doesn’t need to be. And though I personally would have have preferred a little more allowance for creativity in each level, it does it’s job well in a polished manner.
Save the Snail is available now for free on the Google Play Store now; if you’re interested, the relevant Play Store link is located below.
Rating: 3.5/5
Game: Save the Snail
Price: Free
