Slippery Slippery SQUAKE, Cool Idea But Buggy

I’m like Aang! except a train, and with no super powers

Everyone remembers Snake right? I’m not too old that Snake is not people’s first game (Internal Screaming). Well, Squake is a modern day (oh god) reimagining of Snake, with multiplayer, different gameplay modes, and limited time power ups.

In SQUAKE, you drive little trains around a map to accomplish the games mission. You drive your little train around either using the A & D keys or the mouse to tilt, sadly you can only use one at a time and the game will bark at you if you dare to use the wrong one. You have two speeds, those being moving forward at a leisurely rate or boosting forward at speeds previously reserved for travelling back to the future. Like the original snake, any things you pick up get added to the end of your snake. 

So far my favourite gamemode in SQUAKE is the second world, which is a Red vs Blue collect-them-up, where the goal is to grab the most dynamite of your colour and return it to your base quicker than the other team. Dynamite is scattered around a map populated with two bases, saw blades flying around and small little buildings. In contrast to other levels, there are very few items lying around, with only a few power ups and and the TNT boxes that spawn more dynamite sticks nearby. The few power ups are scattered around and can double up the dynamite that is picked up, Fire speeds you up like a train off the rails (heh) and the switcher reverses your controls, and for whatever reason I always go for them and hate myself.  

That’s how I like to play

The teams are very small, 4 a side for the dynamite run, but even with such small teams, I have never played a game with more humans than bots. Interestingly, it’s very hard to tell apart bots from humans even with little name tags floating above the trains. This isn’t because the AI is great or anything, it’s that every other player I’ve found is terrible. Running into walls, crashing into me when I’ve just been going in a straight line, driving right into the saw blades, there’s no end to the stupid deaths I’ve witnessed.

NOOT NOOT

SQUAKE seems to be an okay game, but, every time you boot up the game, there’s a significant chance that, the game just won’t work. There’s a massive bug where the game will boot up fine, you can hop into the lobby but every time you start a game, it won’t do anything and you just get a frozen screencap of part of the game map. After emailing the devs, they know of the problem and are trying to make a fix, but over 3 weeks later I haven’t received any other emails or received any patch to fix this game breaking bug.

While it doesn’t feel a good fit for a PC game, SQUAKE would be a great fit for a mobile game on phones and tablets. I know for certain that my little cousins would love this game, enjoying similar things like slither.io. Sadly, since releasing SQUAKE, it appears on-5 has shut down, their site disappearing off google and the emails remaining unanswered. I hope that someday they come back and SQUAKE gets some more love and attention it deserves.

You might also like
Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published.