Good morning! Ready for another free app? Today we have Snorkeling (iTunes link), a childish game where you collect fish, avoid bad ones, and try to survive as long as you can.
Developed by Alfonso Bozzelli, Snorkeling is a simple minigame, where you play as a blowfish-looking creature, who is eating other smaller fish. All the while there are red fish, those that you can’t eat, and to top it off you have an oxygen meter. Not only do you eat smaller fish, but you collect oxygen bubbles and other powerups that will remove either all the red fish or blue fish from the screen. Hopefully it’ll be the former. What’s most interesting about this game is the controls. You swipe your finger to move your character, and because he’s swimming, each swipe is another stroke of his…fins? Well, let’s just say there’s a lag in your characters movement that you need to adapt to, which makes the game a little more difficult.
Review
Where to start with Snorkeling? Well, it’s very comparable to Minigore or similar minigames, in the sense where you have a straightforward goal to complete, and you don’t wanna die. Well, that’s the premise for just about every minigame, so we’ve established that: it’s a minigame. Controls and gameplay described above, it’s an enjoyable game. It’s simple, straightforward, and the childish scene creates a game for any audience.
Of course, like any minigame, the goal becomes, or should, become more challenging, but when it comes to the level of difficulty in Snorkeling it doesn’t progress too well. I mean it speeds up, and more fish appear on the screen, particularly bad ones, but for the most part there’s no challenge, thus the gameplay doesn’t catch on as much. The biggest mistakes you’ll be making are not getting caught where you need to make quick evasive maneuvers, but rather you didn’t see a red fish under your thumb, and when you went for that blue one you accidentally hit the red one. In this sense the game is extremely childish, and maybe particularly for that audience.
Let me go into some more detail with the controls as well. They’re simple, but the speed your “thing” moves at doesn’t cut it. If there’s anything I’d want to change in this game it’s difficulty levels that revolve around the speed of your character and the amount of fish that progressively engulf the screen. It gets old taking forever to get over to a fish and eat it, and easily evading the other fish on the screen. Come to think of it, making the other fish move faster as well is another good thing to change as the difficulty level progresses. Bigger fish, faster speed. Seems logical.
Don’t let these downsides stop you from getting this game. The concept is pretty much a time waster at this point, but an enjoyable one at that. The game is only on it’s first version (1.0) and only came out in early November, so I think there’s a good chance a lot of these issues will be resolved in future versions. Grab Snorkeling while it’s still free, and if you don’t like it now I think you’ll like it in the future!
So that’s Snorkeling for you! A great game in thought, but it needs some more work. Definitely grab it while it’s still free, because I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some updates in the near future.
