SNKRX is a neat game where you control a snake made of different heroes that automatically attack enemies in multiple waves of increasing difficulty and complexity. The only mechanics you have during gameplay is to make your snake turn left or right, but otherwise the complexity lies in the hiring of heroes to compose your party, upgrading them and choosing power-ups after you’ve completed a few rounds. I had a good time with this game even if the difficulty felt a bit random at times, so I recommend it!
I enjoy the simple mechanics of having a little trail of heroes automatically attacking enemies while the player only has to avoid bumping into them or into their attacks, it was finicky at times and your snake gets harder to steer away from foes as you go along - because it gets longer - but having everyone fight without input is great. Besides dodging attacks and positioning yourself in a spot where you can fire back, collecting gold that drops based on certain skills or items or healing orbs to heal your party is pretty much all you have to do. Sometimes enemies spawn directly above you and there isn’t much you can do to avoid them, but at least it doesn’t happen too often.
What really matters is how your party is formed, and you have a lot of characters to pick from. Each character has an attack (or ability) and one or more classes, getting multiple copies of a character will boost their attack while getting multiple different characters with the same class gives a boost to every character of that class. Party composition is very important, but you are only presented with three random choices by default and can spend gold to reroll them. This makes it a bit frustrating sometimes when you have a party concept going on, but the game won’t give you anything useful. It’s also weird how you can have ‘useless’ choices (units that do not attack, for instance) on your first run (where you don’t have enough gold to reroll). I kinda wish that you would unlock more characters as you went through the game and didn’t have to start with all of them in a huge pool at first, but it would be a kind of a different game. The upgrades you get for your whole party each three rounds are also nice, but they sometimes are too specific to be useful in the current run and since you don’t exactly control the party, it can also feel a little bit arbitrary.
Otherwise, the enemies you face are quite simple; most of them will just try to bump into you, while others shoot projectiles, give speed boosts to other enemies when they die, explode in a bunch of bullets, and then there are elite waves with a giant version of one of the aforementioned enemies. It’s really fun to mix and match different attacks, area of effects, status effects and all that, but the screen can become hard to read. When you complete the next wave, you unlock ‘new game+’ which makes everything more difficult, but increases the number of characters you can have in your snake by one. Fun!
I had a good time with SNKRX! It’s a bit fidgety, but deep enough to be enjoyable and feeds really well into the “one more turn” philosophy of games with random elements that you can restart quickly if everything goes south. Try it out!
