When I
watched a video of Sneezies, I thought it looked really interesting; extremely
simple and cute, yet with a cool chain reaction mechanic. Although I typically
go for much crunchier gameplay, I wanted to give it a try. It's my belief that
very simple games with good graphical design can be a lot of fun despite the
hate they sometimes get. Unfortunately Sneezies is much less of a game than I
thought it would be.
In the
game, a bunch of Sneezies (cute, colorful, round creatures) float around in
bubbles on the screen. They are constantly in motion. You move a cursor around
and can drop one blast of sneezing powder by pressing X. Any Sneezies the blast
touches will sneeze, which pops their bubble and lets out another blast of
sneezing powder, hopefully causing a chain reaction. They then parachute to safety. Some levels feature just a
few Sneezies and some feature close to 100. Unfortunately there isn't too much
strategy to Sneezies. You can try to optimize your drops, but it all seems to
work out pretty randomly. I try to drop between two Sneezies as they are moving
apart so that the chain reaction spreads throughout the screen. I tried a few
other strategies too. But it seems that you get a pretty similar result if you
just press X randomly. Your goal is to get a certain number of Sneezies to pop
their bubbles and fall off the screen. Usually you need to get almost all of
them.
Watching
the Sneezies sneeze and cause big chain reactions is amusing, but the game
wears out its welcome with its length. A full game of Classic mode is close to
50 levels and seems to take forever. The game might have had some potential for
high score chasing with friends if you could play it in five minutes, but it's
hard to imagine ever playing it again after sitting through over an hour of
sneezing.
There are
four game modes. Classic has you go through progressively harder and bigger
levels. Easy mode is like Classic mode but you get a second drop of sneezing
powder if you don't beat the level on your first. Score Ex mode gives you an
increasing amount of points for each Sneezy you get in a level, as opposed to
Classic mode, which gives you 1 point per Sneezy. Challenge mode is slightly
different than the other modes. In it, you get 5 drops of sneezing powder and
try to reach a goal number of Sneezies. After each drop, more Sneezies are
added to the screen. If you drop 75% or more in a single drop, you earn another
drop. Unfortunately this mode is really easy, and you can meet most of the
goals by mashing the X button. After completing Classic mode, I quit Challenge
mode after about ten levels as I was really bored. I was starting to miss drops
on purpose to hurry things along when I met the goal, and I did that thing
where you start to fall asleep and almost drop what you're holding; in this
case, the controller.
The
animation and sound of the Sneezies themselves is quite good, and it's cool to
see a huge chain reaction go off, or to watch a hundred sets of blinking eyes
watching you, waiting for the powder to drop. The sneezing sounds are pretty
amusing, which is good since you will hear them a lot. Unfortunately the
backgrounds are pretty bad looking. The music is passable; a gentle guitar and
some other subtle stuff. After awhile it's annoying though.
Sneezies
would be cool as a mini-game or a mechanic within another game, or if there were
more interaction to it. As it stands, an animal could literally be trained to
press X and could beat the game and beat your high score. A game like that
could still be silly fun, especially if you had a high-score rivalry, but no
one is going to play this game for an hour to try and beat your high score. I'm
sad to say it's a bad game, tier 1.
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