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Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl - Gold Review


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1603589915_SnackWorldboxart.jpg.d8b67ed7958b85fa04b6756d8bcd0880.jpgDeveloper Level-5 continues their penchant for unusual, wacky RPGs with Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl - Gold, a dungeon exploration RPG in a world packed with food puns. Either solo or in multiplayer you'll run through randomly generated dungeons in search of treasure, defeat monsters, collect crafting materials, create new equipment, and do it all over again. Snack World's simple, cyclical nature makes it a decent game to zone out with, but its shallow combat and exploration leave a lot to be desired.
 
In the Kingdom of Tutti-Frutti, your customizable character is found injured and alone. Taken in by King Papaya and his daughter Melonia, you repay their kindness by becoming an adventurer, taking on quests for anyone in need. Along the way you'll make friends, battle a big bad villain, and save the kingdom. It's an adventure story aimed squarely at children, which doesn't make it bad so much as just predictable and a bit uninspired. Snack World does show off Level-5's undying love of puns though, and there's quite a range on display here, from clever food-based wordplay to some truly groan-worthy jokes (as well as a number of jokes that are frankly questionable for a children's game). The game's puns and sense of humor is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, and you may often be tempted to simply fast forward through cutscenes, but there are still some amusing moments.
 
Snack World is a mission-based dungeon crawler RPG. Some missions take you to small sections of the game's world, generally for quick, simple missions like defeat 30 of X enemy, but the meat of the game is in exploring the randomly generated dungeons. Even here though the game is fairly snack-sized: dungeons are always only two floors plus a boss fight. Granted, since the floor layouts are randomly generated you might end up spending a lot of time exploring before you find the stairs to progress, but still, the game is clearly built around quick missions to get in and get out of dungeons.
 
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That's probably for the best since, even in bite-sized chunks, Snack World is an incredibly grindy and repetitive game. It's kind of the nature of this type of game to be a bit repetitive, but Snack World isn't doing itself any favors with its basic dungeon design and boring combat system. First I'll say there is one unique, compelling aspect to combat: you can bring up to six weapons (called Jaras) into any mission, which allows you to target a variety of enemy weaknesses. For example, you might have a sword that is effective against beast-type monsters, and a spear that's effective against aquatic monsters. Bringing both allows you to quickly swap on the fly and deal with any threat you may encounter. In fact, all you have to do is press ZR to instantly swap Jaras to whatever is most effective against the monster you're currently targeting. It's a handy system that encourages you to find/purchase a wide variety of weapons and get a lot of use out of all of them instead of crafting a single powerful weapon to carry you through the whole game.
 
That said, the actual combat system is just kind of boring. You only have a basic attack or a special attack with each Jara, and special attacks operate on a cooldown. Even with that cooldown though special attacks are far more useful than basic ones, so you'll probably end up just dodging until the special is available again. You also have Jara Points (JP) for each Jara, and overusing a Jara will cause it to break until its JP is naturally refilled. What this means is that combat quickly devolves into a boringly simple pattern of using a special, waiting, and using it again, repeat ad naseum. There really isn't much strategy involved since you can instantly swap to the most effective weapon, and using any other weapon is so wildly ineffective that there's no incentive to even try. Combat in Snack World ends up feeling rote and monotonous.
 
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Boss fights up the ante a bit with more challenging battles, but these can be tedious in their own way. Since bosses won't go down in just a hit or two you'll need to be more conscious of your JP and timing your specials well, which makes the fight a bit more interesting. What's frustrating about bosses though is how ridiculously mobile many bosses are. You don't move fast in Snack World—even dodging and dashing will increase you speed only so much—and too many bosses will warp around the battlefield or dash from one end to the other rapidly. It makes boss fights more difficult in the worst way.
 
Lastly, Snack World has a bit of a creature-collection aspect as well. The monsters you fight, called Snacks, can be recruited to fight alongside you. The AI isn't particularly smart so you'll still be the one doing most of the damage, but party Snacks can be invaluable for healing or just for distracting monsters. The one downside to having several Snacks with you is that they can clutter up the screen a bit when there's a lot happening during combat. It's obnoxiously easy to lose track of whom you're targeting, which is often crucial since every monster you're currently battling may have a different weakness. This is also largely to blame on the needlessly restrictive camera controls though. You can only rotate the camera 90 degrees in dungeons, which means you'll often be either moving forward without seeing exactly where you're going or your view will be obstructed by walls or dungeon decorations. It leads to some atrocious camera angles at times and really seems unnecessary.
 
The game's visuals are bright and colorful and cartoony—exactly what you'd expect from a game that is clearly marketing itself as a TV show and merchandise line simultaneously. It doesn't feel particularly inspired for the most part, though at least the monster designs have some room to be creative and unique. For the most part though, Snack World's presentation plays it safe, which also extends to its decent but forgettable soundtrack.
 
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The game's story can be finished in about 20 hours or so, but the bulk of the game is really about repeating missions, taking on side quests, and otherwise grinding for weapons and armor. The post-game includes a ton of additional content, but all of it has the same sense of grind and monotonous repetition that characterizes the main game. On the bright side Snack World does have a multiplayer mode, and dungeon crawling can be a bit more exciting when you have a friend along for the adventure. Not every mission is available in co-op but it can still liven things up a bit to hop online with a friend.

 
Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl - Gold is an admirable attempt at making a dungeon crawling RPG more accessible to a young target audience, but the final result is a bit too lopsided. For a game clearly aimed at kids the humor is weirdly inconsistent, the battle system is initially new-player-friendly but far too quickly devolves into mindless repetition, and the dungeon design is simple enough for young players to grasp but that also makes it rather dull. The grindy nature of the game also feels like perhaps asking too much of young or inexperienced players. Ultimately Snack World feels like a handful of good ideas stretched to their breaking point.
 
Rating: 6 out of 10 Snacks
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