Is there cross-platform play in slither.io?

Posted by Nick Tylwalk on June 25th, 2016
+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad

So you've sunken plenty of hours into crawling around in slither.io on your iPhone or iPad. You've got your stories of tragedy and triumph, the times you coiled four snakes at one time balanced out by the others when you had a length of more than 30,000 and some little jerk swerved in front of you at the last second.

You've even followed our adviceand practiced the art of self-sacrifice so that you can play with a friend, since the ability to choose your own server still hasn't made it into the game yet. But let's say you have other mates without iOS devices? Is there a way to play with them too?


The answer to that question is, "It depends." There is indeed cross-platform mobile play in slither.io. We found that out the same way we tested to see if you can get into the same server, discovering that someone playing on a Kindle (with the Android version of slither.io) can indeed end up on the same server as a friend crawling around on iPhone or iPad.

What there doesn't appear to be at the moment is cross-platform play between mobile and PC. Those games are hosted on separate servers.

Why? We'd have to ask slither.io creator Steve Howse to be sure, but it likely has to do with the PC version's more robust graphics compared to its mobile counterpart. If you've never played the game in a browser, the first thing you'll notice is that the dots, which are static on mobile, are rendered in such a way that they are in constant motion, slightly flickering and bouncing around. The radar also shows the locations of snakes instead of just your position relative to the entire playing field.

Alas, PC players don't have some of the game's latest goodies, such as the alternate control schemes or the option to play against the AI. You also can't choose a specific skin, randomly getting one assigned to you each time you start a new game.

But since we're a mobile site, the PC question isn't a huge deal to us. The good news is that iOS-Android cross-platform play is possible, and you're competing against the same pool of mobile players no matter what phone or tablet you decide to use. Now if that update to choose a server or find a friend would hurry up and get here, all would be right in the slither.io world.

Unless we want to talk about bots and mods ...

Posted in: News
Tagged With: Games, Iphone, IPad, Android, slither.io
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