Blockade
Review
Blockade is a somewhat unheard of, simple, fun game. That's about all you can say about it, really. It's fun. It's a traditional sort of arcade style game. It's pretty much a direct clone of the once-popular Blockade arcade game, in fact. While it's far from perfect as far as they go, I quite like this one.
So let me educate you if you don't know how it works. You guide your little block of ASCII around, and it leaves a trail behind. The idea is to force the heads of the other snakes to ram into you, or to force them off the playscreen, usually by surrounding them and giving them no exits. It's that simple. The game keeps score for you over multiple rounds.
Scoring sadly, is one of the weaker points. Although it keeps scores over the rounds you play in one session, there is no permanent score card. This probably doesn't matter too much, though. It doesn't to me. The biggest drawback from my point of view is the fact that the multiplayer only supports two human players. Though you can have more computer players to make things more interesting, it would have been much more fun if we could have three or four player games. This is mostly due to the AI not being amazing. It's good, it's servicable, and it never makes a mistake, but it's not cunning, so you can usually win quite easily. But this is a game from 1986, so you can't really complain.
Well, actually, I can complain, and my last complaint will be the graphics aren't very informative. Look at the screenshots, and you'll notice you can't tell the head from the rest of the body. This isn't really annoying when playing, since it's pretty obvious where you are since that's the direction you're moving, but it can make it tricky to tell who is out of the game and who isn't, and makes it hard to figure out what's going on in still screenshots. The menu isn't really that intuitive either, but that doesn't really matter.
While it seems like I'm being pretty negitive about this game, I don't mean to. It's actually a really nice Snake clone that works really, really well, partly due to the large range of options, partly just because the mechanics work well. This is a perfect game to waste 20 minutes or so on while you wait for something to happen, and you can do it alone, or with a friend.
Knyght
Downloads
- Blockade (PC) (23.3 KB)
Links
No links for this game.