Welcome to our review of Snack World, The dungeon crawl. Let the dungeon crawl…begin!
After your village is invaded, become a heroic adventurer and seek revenge against the villainous Sultan Vinegar! In this RPG, crawl through randomly generated dungeons in your search for rare treasure, and team up with up to three other players in local or online multiplayer to take down tenacious tyrants!
You find yourself, within an inch of your life, at the gates of Tutti-Frutti. You remember nothing…but at least you have fabulous new friends to adventure with! Outfit yourself with jaras: weapons, shields, healing tonics, and status-buffing colognes with randomised effects that can be shrunk down for ease of carrying. Switch them on the fly based on the baddies you’re battling!
Snacks are snapshots of quirky creatures and kooky characters that you can summon to your side in battle. Collect and trade snacks and jaras with your real-life friends to build some impressive battle possibilities! Bag booty to be the star of Tutti-Frutti! The more you achieve on quests, the more chests you’ll earn! There are all sorts of quests, and ultra-rare items up for grabs!
Wake up Sloe White, aid the girl group Spicy Galz, help out a…vegetabulldog or a crock ness monster?!? Be the all-around good guy in side-splitting side quests! High fantasy and high tech collide in this fourth-wall-breaking RPG with a modern twist for gamers of all generations!
Snack World is surprisingly addictive and it is not even an easy game. I busted so many missions and side quests, I lost count long ago. Yet I keep getting pulled in. I keep insisting on trying new approaches to really battle it out. Yes, when you pick a quest, you can auto equip everything for the best results. I just went from “whatever” all the way to “best possible” on numerous occasions.
The entire game resolves around food puns and great action like I mentioned in my preview and even now, many extra hours into the game, I still stand by this saying. The puns are still horrible and the action is still so darned good, that it outweighs anything else.
Every quest comes down to the same deal, you enter a small world with a specific mission. Be it beating a specific boss or getting a certain amount of an item, it is all the same basic approach. The power of the Snack World game all lies in its replayability and how the game just captures your attention.
You enter the world, equipped with several Jara. Jara are your weapons of choice and whether they are a healing staff, a dark axe or a defensive shield, you need to switch between them when they run out of energy. You can’t just use your overpowered bow and arrows on enemies from a distance because some of those enemies will be more easily slain by an axe or a sword!
Enemies also attack and their attacks are actually very much announced as well as the direction of their attacks. You can often choose to keep fighting but equally often you will be better off to dodge the attacks. Finding the balance between what decision to take, is actually quite hard. You would expect this game to be more children oriented, but it actually packs quite the (fruit) punch!
Snack World has a lot going on really. The upgrading of your Jaras, finding materials to get it happening. The “snacks” are actually the enemies and you can capture those by taking pictures once they are down and get a white circle around them. Grab the picture at the right time and they join your team.
Now you can use them at your leisure as your team members. Nothing beats getting help during your battles and the deeper down the rabbit hole of the storyline, the more help you can enlist, all the way up to three snacks at once. Those same snacks can be familiarised and be even better friends with them.
I can hear you ask it already, you need the lollipop items to achieve this. Needless to say you will be picking up tons of items along the way, each with their own function. Items to get the edge in battles, items for your snacks, items to upgrade your Jaras, …. The game is so much deeper than you’d expect when you watch the trailers and some gameplay videos.
I think it is already very clear that I love this game a lot and I even own several figures of the series as well as the Japanese physical game. Sadly my Japanese is not sufficient to fully understand the game, because I would have finished the game long ago if I could. Another sad part is that at time of writing this review, I did not find a single way to activate my NFC figures in the game.
According to a thread on Reddit, in the Japanese game, you open up the NFC scanning after the second level when you get access to the fortune telling lady. In the translated version however, you get some random items every time, once daily. She drops decent stuff, even when playing other games, I remember to log in once a day just to grab those items.
Now for some of my annoyances… Snack world has a very big menu and it is pretty much all over the place. The left buttons can open quick access to places like the shops and the fortune telling lady. The R button opens the quests, the Y and X each open their own menus. There is a lot to do and at one point, I wanted to use some points to use the character builder and I had to really look for it.
There is so much to do, that I just lost track of an option. This did get better along the way, but I did at times feel this was a battle against the system and not just me being me.
What I really liked were the silly sound effects. They are just so weird and totally wrong, they become fun again. I could swear I hear Chris Jericho, the AEW wrestling champ, or at least a very similar voice.
In conclusion, Snack world is pretty much a grand game, one of those titles where you are not expecting any real depth, but let me tell you, it really delivers. I was very surprised that I just kept playing, kept grinding, kept trying so often. And that is why this game is getting a high score from me. The inability to scan my figures did annoy me more than I’d wish to admit, maybe have both options available could have even made the game even better?
But all in all, Snack world is fun, addictive and anything but easy. It provides just about the right challenge and if you do not attempt overpowered quests, I am quite sure you won’t die every single time… Snack World is also possibly the first game in a very long time where I feel like going for a 100% completion…
