Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold (Nintendo Switch) Preview

Starting as any good RPG should, after a surprisingly in depth character customisation option, the titular hero wakes up with no recollection of his life in the unsurprisingly named Kingdom of Tutti Fruitti. After getting a lay of the land, unnamed Hero type is sent to the obligatory castle to begin his journey. What follows is a frankly bonkers opening FMV driven by J-pop madness, translated food lyrics et al. It's a surprising, albeit jarring introduction, but after such an introduction, any player would be hard pressed to get stuck in without a huge smile on their face and a hope for the rest of the adventure to follow suit.

Self-awareness plays a major part in the draw here, and from the outset pretty much every character met makes a comment on the generic RPG tropes littered throughout. One of the first interactions gives our protagonist the title of Regal Positive Go-getter (or RPG for short) before commenting that any would-be adventurer will require a trip to the towns item shop before any more activities take place, especially any that involved leaving the safety of the Kingdom walls.

Items are easily managed, and before questing any items, armour or weapons can be manually set within the menu, or in an extremely helpful addition, 'Auto Equipped.' Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl - Gold as with any other RPG can feel like a bit of a slow burner in the early hours, and the ability to best outfit a character and head out certainly takes the edge off. Customisation is always welcome but with the light-hearted approach to storytelling and continual mocking of RPG tropes, it could be expected that menu slogging could be avoided. An easy accessible fast forward option mapped to the R Button is also a welcome addition though in this reviewers opinion moves slightly quicker than it needs to, and he is happy to skip over any important dialogue. With a little more thought and attention paid, a handy feature like this could have been a bit more intuitive, and in turn, useful.

Apart from these oversights, there are a lot of good ideas executed throughout, that set this title apart. One of the most interesting additions are party members, and summons implemented through the snack system. All faithful compatriots are presented as food based designs, and it does give a food based buzz every time a new character is unlocked. The majority of the fun in terms of combat can be found switching assets in and out to find the best combination to deal with the crawl ahead. From what has been sampled so far, there does seem to an abundance of options that scratch the collecting itch. A neat little extra is that these can also be shared and traded online.

Unfortunately, for all the fun to be had collecting, the combat when questing, the meat in the Snack World sandwich as it were, is stale. Enemies expectantly pop up in the generic maps laid out, and although looking vastly different from each other, can usually be dispatched with a quick sword swipe and button mash. Boss battles do require a bit more thought, but the simplistic, repetitive combat rears its ugly head a lot more often than anybody would like. As rewarding as the spoils of the quest are, it feels as if the grind isn't worth the time or effort. On reflection, this style of gameplay does lend itself perfectly to a pick-up-and-play, portable title so it seems rather counter-intuitive in the genre it is attached to.

The bread and butter of an RPG that is worth investing time with, is the battle system, especially for a title the literally has 'Dungeon Crawl' in the title. Perhaps some tweaks to the difficulty could mix things up a little, and as this is only a preview, difficulty and strategy could be implemented into the later chapters to really spice things up. From what is on offer at the moment, however, there doesn't seem to be a lot to indicate any changes from start to finish.