Snip and Chu - The Game Review

Remember Game of Watchcraft? It was a quirky yet familiar take on the Game & Watch format of LCD gaming of old, and it was a pretty challenging game indeed. Invoking the difficulty levels of days gone by, it took a bit more patience than most games these days. For fans of the Game & Watch genre though, it was a hit. Snip and Chu retains that charm as well as that level of difficulty.

Based on an original comic book IP of the same name, Snip and Chu involves some fairly messy humor - and I mean that literally. Chu is a piece of gum while Snip is a discarded toenail that must be rescued from a deranged robotic cleaning machine by the name of RecyKiller. Quirky is the right word for this.

Laid out like a Game & Watch title, the iPad screen is divided into two sections with controls on either side, replicating the style of the LCD device. There's a d-pad to control movement while a jump/action button dictates the rest. Moving around is fairly easy, although at times the d-pad felt a little unresponsive. Then again, when I played such LCD games as a kid they were sometimes unresponsive so this could well be a homage to such awkwardness.

Timing is everything to Snip and Chu, with players needing to keep an eye out for obstacles ahead. The aim is to collect three spanners and deliver them to Snip in order to rescue him from his prison, before undertaking the same role again. Things progressively get trickier but it's the same screen layout each time. Essentially, Snip and Chu is a score attack game about trying to beat one's last score while being restricted by minimal extra lives.

How fun it is mostly depends on the nostalgia factor. As a fan of such types of games the first time around, it was charming to go back to earlier stylings. Little features such as how tapping on the screen causes it to go more pixelated, just like with a real LCD screen, are cute and charming. One does need to have the memories of earlier days to be really captivated though.

Snip and Chu might not quite stand up to modern day platformers (although it will certainly be more testing than most), but as a fond look back to simpler days it's got enough charm to be worth trying.