xbox live indie game reviews

At 200 points this one might almost be worth the points, but it's just impossible to recommend it for 400 points.  At its heart, this is the Snake game that everyone who owns a modern cell phone has played with their thumb.  I've been playing incarnations of this game since QBasic's Nibbles, and there is one thing that all previous versions I've played have had in common -- I didn't have to pay for them.

Snake360 does provide a few graphical "upgrades" by placing your playing field over a pictoral backdrop and by providing a slight 3d-boxing edge effect to the snake and the targets, but the difference feels nominal.  The controls are what you would expect, but I found that when using the d-pad or the left/right stick to control my snake I would much more frequently have accidental loop-backs resulting in loss of a life.  Using AXYB however felt much more natural as a control scheme, but carried the added difficuly of making it harder timing-wise to do one-column/row jigs to line up with a missed target.  Also irritating are the Announcer and Snake sound effects.  Thankfully these can be turned off in the options menu, but when playing with the default settings they are overwhelmingly annoying.

Buy this game if you absolutely cannot live without having some version of Snake on every media device you own.  If this is not the case, you more than likely already have a free version somewhere that you can play and save yourself $5.

Full Disclosure:  I did not by the full version, and only played the Trial Version.  I refuse to buy any game for 400 points if the demo does not wow and inspire.