This game is different, really different.

* It looks arcade-style, but it's actually very tactical.
* It looks like Snake, but it isn't like that at all, you can grow and shrink and run into yourself and it's fine.
* It looks seriously old-school but it's actually conceptually very new.

I mean, I can describe it in terms of a mash of other old games. Imagine you had the arcade classic Mr Do, as in - you dig your own maze, but instead of a ball-throwing clown, you were a variable-length snake instead. And instead of dropping apples on enemies to kill them, you tunneled and dropped the whole world on them.

That's the game at its simplest. There's a bit more - instead of just getting points for killing enemies, they turn into a pile of blocks that you can pick up for points. You don't want to pick them up as soon as you see them, you'll want to create a load of them and collect them all at once to get massive scores using the combo bonus. Also there's a diamond hidden somewhere which you can collect to double your current score.

The monsters roam above ground and you need to dig up to create a tunnel to lead them down. More "ground" rains from the sky one block at a time. The speed of the game can be altered at any time, anywhere from "a bit too fast to play" to an absolute crawl, and you can switch it to turn-based if that's still not the right speed. And also, there are levels and different monsters to face.

All of these details mean it takes a little while to get your bearings with the game and get used to luring monsters underground. But I think it's worth it. It becomes a game of emergent tactics, and I'm still not sure I have it all worked out yet, but it's fun to discover more. All together, it's a unique little game.

BTW it's not official or anything, but the game's narrative, as I imagine in my head, is that instead of a snake, you're a dragon (or a wyrm!), like Smaug from The Hobbit, digging out a huge cavern inside a mountain, luring monsters down to kill them, amassing a huge pile of gold. Biding your time, lying in wait.

I really do like this game.

It's...an interesting title with an interesting twist on the good old Snake formula, sadly, while the game does a good job of looking like an old arcade game, it just doesn't have the same addictive factor, it's just a bit too slow, sure, you can increase your speed but it ends up becoming too fast then.

The idea is for you to make some holes and lead enemies to below ground and smash them by making terrain fall on them, again, that's a cool idea, sadly, the game is just a bit too slow and the enemies are a bit too easy to dodge and not aggresive enough, preferring to just walk around until you get close to them most of the time, it also doesn't help that again, the game is a bit too slow, and you may end up not having enough terrain to do whatever you want, so sometimes you just sit arround waiting for more terrain to fall off(which can be thankfully sped up) in a safe area which just goes against the arcade fast paced idea.

I don't know, maybe i was expecting a more frantic game, but it feels like a tactical and more slow version of Snake that just does not have enough variety to make me keep coming back to it.

Again, interesting idea, but Mindware has done better games that are more fun and addictive like Heiankyo Alien and Space Mouse.

Cosmic Snake takes a little more getting used to the mechanics compared to other Mindware games, but it is really satisfying once you get the hang of it. I can see myself putting some hours into this game, especially with all the achievements tied in. This is one of Mindware's greatest games yet, but if you haven't tried Space Mouse or HEIANKYO ALIEN, you should. All of them are perfect indie's. I give them all, including Cosmic Snake 10/10. Im suprised these games aren't more well known. They are hidden gems on Steam and the Dev's are the kindest and most caring people that you'll ever talk to. Every game they come out with is worth the price and they put a ton of love and care into each title.

Classic snake game reimagined with a bit of a learning curve and a lot of strategy. It's pretty tough but fun.

Really a fun take on a classic genre. While I have a soft spot for "snake" games in that I learned some programming tricks writing my own version, there's not too many commercial snake games that seem to work. This game has that problem licked, with a strategy very much in its arcade mold, and by stretching the elements of the snake game mold it avoids some of the cliche issues one runs into playing games of that ilk. Not just another great game by Mickey Albert, but a game worth trying on its own merits as an innovative, thoughful puzzler, played as an arcade game.

Snake mixed with digdug? i have no idea what i'm doing

+1 Coin-Op

mekara beam!!! i received excellent pleasure from this game

makes a decent 1$ app 2/10

I'm a bit of a fan of Mindware, so am predisposed to like this. However, this one has a learning curve like a wall, then suddenly you've got 60 million points and are not sure quite how, but eventually it starts to make sense and you find yourself starting up for another 5 minute burst of madness.

The bad:
- The options don't get saved (high scores do) so the starting level and window size have to be set every time you launch
- If there's a guide to what is going on I didn't see it. The demo doesn't really explain much either.
- I play with an XBO controller, but it seems like speed up/down are only on the keyboard.

With that out of the way, once it settles into some sort of zone the 5 minute game is all about farming some critical mass of treasure, which you then attack in such a way as to preserve your combo counter to then try to get the high scores. The time limits provides a nice sort of ending so this doesn't go on forever. What makes this difficult is judging when you have enough treasure on the screen and enough potential to get more once you've cleared it.

Overall it's a really fascinating game design in the dig dug/mr driller type area, and as with most of the other Mindware games it has that great 8-bit aesthetic (including the music), only executed on modern hardware.