Inside Social Games

Snowraft is a snowball fight action/strategy game by Matt Burton and Amir Amini. Employing adorable flash animation and an annoyingly catchy soundtrack, the game is simple: command your little army of red kids to throw snowballs at the blue kids. When you get hit with a snow ball, you freeze and can’t move. Too many hits and you’re dead. Last team standing wins.

In order to get bigger snowballs and better health, you need to invite your friends. Once it becomes obvious that you’re dead in this adolescent frozen arms race without proper armament, you decide to invite everyone you know.

Developers could learn a lot from this game because it incorporates simple flash animation, an easy-control system (click, drag, click), and an economy that is tied to perpetuating itself through invites.

Yet, this is also one of the more player-friendly games I’ve played. You don’t have to rely on your vast army of friend invites to move beyond stage one. The challenging AI makes it so the initial two stages are enticing enough to get players to want to keep playing. There’s a chance that players could quit before getting upgrades (and inviting friends), but it’s a worthy risk by the developers. If the game is any good (Snowraft is), players will invite their friends not only to keep playing it, but also because they want to share it. Once they’ve added the application, you can challenge your friends to earn more points and bragging rights.

While the gameplay isn’t difficult - you essentially move your characters as close to theirs as possible and then click repeatedly - it’s both fun and addictive enough to keep playing. There’s a certain element of strategy too in terms of how much you want to micromanage your team.

I found it really easy to keep dodging with one and then attacking the enemy while they reloaded. This often left my other two guys as sitting ducks, which meant the game was more strategy-intensive than I had initially thought. Still, even with the upgrades this game isn’t going to become an addiction that is going to get you fired at work and lead you to living a life in a box. So, it’s not the next Snood, but it is worth a chance for a couple hours.

It’s a solid little game that is simplistic in its formula but is unobtrusive in its requests to perpetuate. In other words, the game doesn’t sacrifice self-perpetuation for gameplay.

Developer’s Score: 7/10

Gameplay: 7/10

Odds soundtrack will get stuck in head: 8/10