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    Snuggle Truck

    Game » consists of 13 releases. Released Apr 28, 2011

    Snuggle Truck is a 2D, sidescrolling, physics-based driving game where the player must rescue injured animals from the wilderness and bring them to a zoo where they will be healed and taken care of.

    mikelemmer's Smuggle Truck (PC) review

    Avatar image for mikelemmer

    A Bad Port of a Mediocre iOS Game

    Time Played: 1 hr.

    Courses Unlocked: Easy through Hard (Expert courses unplayed)

    Major Bugs Encountered: 2

    What I'd Pay: $1

    Steam Price (2/5/12): $5

    Apple Store Price: Free

    I tried not to hate this game from the start. "Alright, so what if it looks like a port of a Flash game for kids? What if you get this dreadful feeling it's going to be mindnumbingly boring? You knew you'd have games like this when you vowed to review every cheap Steam game released. So quit whining, buckle down, and put in the time." And I did so.

    And then the game crashed on me and all impartiality flew out the window.

    Let me correct that: not only did the game crash, it managed to lock up my entire computer. It couldn't find the Leaderboard and thus got stuck in some endless loading loop. When I tried to force quit from Task Manager, it immediately popped the screen back to itself. I had to force restart the computer.

    Any entertainment the game could've provided was not enough to salve my irritation at the crashing. In the game, you drive a truck carrying stuffed animals in back from Start to Finish, over various hills, ramps, and obstacles, trying to reach Da Zoo with as many passengers still in the truck as possible. Occasionally you pass a checkpoint where a new passenger is flung into the sky for you to catch. In addition to the terrain, there's the occasional box of TNT to avoid, along with a few powerups like the Rocket Boosters and Cargo Net to make your trip easier. You accelerate/decelerate with the Up and Down keys, and tilt the truck forward & backward with the Right and Left keys. And... well, that's about it.

    The graphics & music don't stand out much, either, aside from how jarring the contrasts are between the bright fluffy animals, the beat-up truck, and the Wile E. Coyote background vistas. I later found out that was because it was originally a game satirizing illegal immigration (Smuggle Truck) that required a last-minute graphics swap to pass approval for the Apple Store and later Steam. If it still had the original premise/graphics, I might've given the game some props for it, but as-is the graphics just look like they come from 2 different games.

    The handling of the truck is a tad awkward and slow to respond, but I suspect that was on purpose. What makes it aggravating is how hard it is to tell which landings will send your passengers flying and which ones won't. The physics involved feel arbitrary, and sometimes I swore some of the animals just glitched through the truck and fell out of the back. It doesn't help that the minimap doesn't show the upcoming terrain; the camera usually does a decent job of zooming out enough to show you what's coming up, but there are still places you can't brace for what's coming unless you've memorized the level.

    The levels themselves felt bland, but perhaps that's because I haven't gotten into the Extreme or User-Made levels. The ones in the Easy through Hard courses, at least, didn't endear themselves to me much, which just made it more aggravating when I had to replay them over & over again to get more medals to unlock the harder courses. I had to get 25 more medals to unlock the Extreme courses. I wasn't looking forward to it, but I was prepared to buckle down...

    And then the game froze again. It began refusing to show the Victory screen after I finished a level. Several minutes of blind clicking later, I finally managed to click the invisible Proceed button and get back to a screen where I could see my cursor. I immediately quit the game and look at the time played: 53 minutes.

    In 53 minutes, I had been bored out of my skull, had the game freeze up on me once, and had it force me to click an invisible button once. Odds were, it didn't have anything special in the last batch of levels that would justify putting up with even more crashes, freezes, and bugs trying to unlock them.

    But I still wanted to be thorough. So I decided to check into getting the original version of the game here... and couldn't find where to buy it. Had they replaced it with the Steam version? Looked like it. Hmm, that was troublesome. On a whim, I decided to see what it cost on the Apple Store.

    Apple Store Price: Free

    ...

    You know what? If you want this, grab the Apple Store version. It is not worth $5 for a buggy port of the censored version of this game.

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