SP Review: Snake Boat Otterrific Arcade (PS4)

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Sturmvogel Prime
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SP Review: Snake Boat Otterrific Arcade (PS4)

Post by Sturmvogel Prime »

Final chapter of Otterrific Arcade's reviews. Let's finish this with Snake Boat.

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Looks like a joke...a really bad one.

The gameplay of this sorry excuse for a videogame consists on paddle the boat by pressing the X button, this will cause your boat to move a short distance. You know what this means, tapping the button like a god-damned idiot to move from point A to point B, just like the infamous Zuul building from the NES Ghostbusters game. There's zero strategy here, just paddle around the island in hope of dodging the arrows until you reach 5 minutes to get the trophies and then commit suicide by getting hit by the arrows.
Once you die, you'll unlock a new difficulty, but after watching a YouTube video, I've realized that unlocking difficulties is beyond pathetic. Any normal player will think unlocking Normal will require to play on Easy enough time to do that. ¿But guess what?, just stay 3 seconds on Easy, quit the game and there you go, the same thing to unlock Hard.

On Easy, the game grants you 10 hit points while Normal and Hard grants you three. In an exercise of videogame stupidity, the game will throw you arrows that move on a curved wave trajectory increasing their chances of hitting you. Challenge is one thing, but this is simply another example of the "Idiocy = Difficulty" equation that fails on provide a hard but fair challenge since we're dealing with terrible controls. But there's more videogame stupidity yet.



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Example of "How not to provide challenge"
Make the player unable to see where he/she's going.


Blind as a Mango is the same game on a pitch black screen with only your field of vision as the only thing to guide you. Like the Normal and Hard difficulties, you only have to play the game on Hard 3 seconds and quit to unlock this mode.

Graphics, well just have a look, pathetic as ever, but at least the "tide" effect on the water is worth to mention since makes me wonder they've bothered to detail something, minimal, but appreciated since it's a simple effort to make it look more like "We've made a little more effort rather than being 100% lazy with our product".
The music is a calm piano tune that reminds me of the works of The Piano Guys which lasts 4 minutes with 37 seconds. After a two second silence it loops again. With the tap the X button constantly to swim and the loops in the music how not to think on the NES Ghostbusters game? On the bright side, it is not a crappy chiptune that slows down like in Baseball Bout.



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That's a negative result on the Lea Scale.

Snake Boat, like the rest of Otterrific Arcade titles, is a failure of gaming not just because it's another lazy done-on-the-cheap product, it's a done-on-the-cheap game that also relies on the concept of "Bad ideas make it difficult" to provide challenge, but it turns out to be a waste of time and money. Well, at leasts tries to make a decent quite enjoyable happy musical piece. Unfortunately, that happiness doesn't save the game from being a Trophy Milker like the rest of Otterrific Arcade's catalogue.

Fortunately, I don't have to worry about Otterrific Arcade after this. Just 1 level of ZJ the Ball and the final chapters of Project: Summer Ice - Bowling and I'm done with this Via Dolorosa of trash gaming.



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THE VIDEOGAME CALVARY IS FAR FROM OVER.

Part 2?...They've gotta be [EXPLETIVE] kidding me. Looks like I'm far from being free of playing trash games.
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