Snorms Review

Snorms is a bizarre creation. It instantly smacks of retro goodness at first – you play a soldier resting on his native island when an evil race of pixels attack, so he jumps into his gunship and proceeds to wipe out every single one of those bastard cubemen. Or something along those lines.

It’s a unique take on Doom style shooting and dungeon crawling, sticking an isometric view on the genre which seems to make it instantly appealing. Then you realise all of the levels look exactly the same.

“Okay, that’s not too bad”, you think to yourself, as your expectations plummet faster than tourism in Somalia. “It’s an indie game, what did I expect?”. Then you realise you’re essentially playing Call of Duty if it was made in the early nineties. The levels are blandly designed and don’t do the combat justice at all, instead making you wade through the brown and green tiles to get to the juicy gun-based heart of the game. The best way I can describe Snorms’ general look is bald. As in, the levels look alopecic. And that’s never a good way to describe level design.

Despite the unfinished look it all has, it’s good fun, and the variety of weapons you get to play with keep combat interesting when everything else feels a little bland. It’s really the core of the game and the amount of fun you’re having can creep up on you from time to time – I was surprised at how intently I was focusing on the later shootouts.

GRAPHICS

They’re good, but they’re all you’d expect from a single indie developer. If ‘art direction’ was an actual direction, Snorms would sit in a café at the side of the road drinking coffee and sneering at better looking indie games as they strolled by. It’s just got a generic game look, and in a time where unique visual and audio elements can make a game alone, it falls flat completely.

SOUND

Forgettable. Not annoying in the slightest but the soundtrack doesn’t make any real accompaniment to what’s happening in the game and this makes some levels really difficult to enjoy. You may as well be playing with the sound muted for all the good it does.

GAMEPLAY

Simple controls and an equally easy to navigate system of upgrade menus and weapon choices make Snorms, for however long you stay with it, pleasant to play. It might be a stripped-down shooter, but the enemies become genuinely difficult as you progress which provides most of the play value. If the game was too easy, it’d be a boring slog through various squares of grey and brown until someone tells you Sleeping Dogs is out or something.

It’s fun, easy to master, and challenging enough for the hardcore but it’s just not addictive in any sense of the word and by no means compelled me to return to it after clearing it. You can grind earlier levels for cash to buy upgrades to overcome the bigger challenges but the game never really hooks you into doing it for any other reason than just repeating the same thing you’ve been doing for hours already. At least World of Warcraft had Spectral Tigers. In closing, it’s a fairly average experience that will appeal to some due to its difficulty later on. If you’re not a huge fan of grinding, you may want to steer clear.

Snorms is a third person shooter, in an isometric view, available on PC (Windows/Linux) and Mac.

You play a soldier resting on his native island, but it is very quickly overrun by monsters from outer space and no outside help is available. You put on your armor, get into your battle ship and go to find out what happened at the peril of your life.

Snorms features : player leveling, weapon upgrading, 41 maps (3 episodes), 22 enemies, 14 weapons, 10-15 hours of gameplay,…

Features

• Old-school isometric shooter
• 10-15 hours of gameplay
• 41 levels
• 14 upgradable weapons
• 22 unique monsters
• Experience and leveling system

Pricing and Availability

Snorms is available as a 3 episodes pack for 6.99 € (summer sale! 3.99€) on its official website (http://www.snorms.com) and on Desura (a digital distribution service for gamers). Episodes can also be bought individually for 2.99 €.

Requirements

OS: Windows XP/Vista/Seven, Linux, Mac OS 10.5+
Processor: 2.4 Ghz or equivalent processor
Memory: 1GB RAM

Links

Official website: http://www.snorms.com
Desura: http://www.desura.com/games/snorms
Ubuntu Software Center: https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/snorms/
Demo: http://www.snorms.com/?p=download_demo
Dev blog: http://www.microbasic.net/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/haedri

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.