Review: Snail Bob

Snail Bob, another new addition to the ever-expanding and ever-diverse Chillingo catalogue, will not set your pulse racing. The music scores your ear drums like a nervy cat dragged across a nail bed. The art style, ripped directly from a Flash game freely available on the web, was obviously etched out by a seven year-old with a full box of Crayola. However, as a physics-puzzler-cum-hidden-object games go, it’s well-designed. Just don’t look at it for too long lest you claw your eyes out.

A side-on spin on the Lemmings formula, Snail Bob tasks you with manipulating each of the brisk 30-second levels to help Bob reach the exit. Bob is, for the slower of you, the titular snail. He’s ugly as sin.

Each stage is kept fresh by being a gentle joy to work out. From draggable ledges to buttons and rotating valves, there’s plenty to work out in each stage, and the rate at which they chug along is appreciably rapid. The occasional clever trick crops up – such as dropping blocks of chalk to cue a sneeze, sending obstacles flying – and delivers the odd chuckle, too.

Provided you don’t mind projecting hydrochloric acid into your eyes, Snail Bob will keep you amused for a handful of commutes.

However, there’s no variety in the solutions you can find. There is, as with the likes of Cut The Rope and Angry Birds and every other sodding game out there, three-star ratings to acquire, and these are acquired in the most literal way. The three stars are hidden in the level, whether it’s as part of the art style or behind a manipulatable object, and earning a perfect grade demands some decent attention to each level’s surroundings.

As a result, Snail Bob doesn’t feel like a challenge – and is more of a pushover than a startled cow. There’s no puzzling to this puzzler, save for working out the solution to each stage, which largely amounts to trial and error after watching Bob catch fire or plummet to his doom two or three times. Finding hidden objects is, and always will be, greyer than the average British summer day, and your ability to enjoy this game will be limited by how easy it is for you to be impressed. The art style leaves much to be desired; sadly this extends to just about every aspect of the game’s presentation. As a result, one can only assume that the same child that drooled on a graphics tablet to produce the game’s unique visual stylings also composed the music and performed the voice acting with equal levels of deftness.

Look past the face-in-a-blender visuals and the lack of genuine tests of skill and Snail Bob can entertain for a bus journey or four. But the game’s imagination stretches about as far as a snail can in thirty seconds (Editor’s note – please don’t put this analogy to the test, as it would be messy).  Buy it, breeze through it, then rapidly apply salt to the icon on your home screen until it evaporates in a mist of wholly deserved squealing and agony.