The story of Magic Planet Snack is delightfully sweet. You play a wizard whose spell has gone wrong and transformed him into a giant worm. All the other wizards want to get rid of him because he's chewing through the planets in his quest for food. Every planet has a delicious meal at the very center and you crave it so much that you are willing to tunnel through and destroy the whole planet to get to it. It seems a little morbid, but the way it is portrayed in-game and the lack of any real plot development keep it from being depressing. The end is also extremely sweet, even if it is rather apocalyptic.

The graphics of Magic Planet Snack are, as mentioned before, very bright and colorful. THe pixel artwork is stunning, with pastel colors mixed expertly to bring across a feeling of joy and goofiness. The fact that you are eating giant sandwiches and ice cream cones only furthers the child-like nature of the game. The sounds are okay, but could really use some refinement in order to be great. The music is very catchy, which is absolutely essential for an arcade-like game like this. If you get tired of the music, you get tired of the game, after all.

Gameplay is simple. You are a worm flying around, and you must score points by eating various bits and pieces of planets and other flotsam. Everything comes from the top of the screen, with the insides of the planet looking like something out of Dig Dug or Mr. Driller. Eating the rocks of the planet don't do much, but eating orbs raises your HYPER meter as well as gives you a few points. You can't eat lava at all, as it will explode and promptly kill you. Your end goal for each planet is to eat your way to the core, devour it, then make your way out, eating as much as possible. Every time you die, you simply start where you last were with a bit of invincibility. In-between devouring different planets, you fly through space avoiding the shots of an enemy wizard, with later levels having the wizard being much faster.

The HYPER mode is the core of the scoring system, as doing regular eating of cities and rocks are not nearly enough. In order to score well, you must collect ten orbs, which fills up your HYPER meter, represented by (imagine that) the word Hyper at the bottom right. The first five orbs creates the word, and the next 5 make it glow, with a full glowing word causing HYPER mode. HYPER is important because it's one of the only ways to actually score good amounts of points, as every static block (lava, orb, or rock) turns into candy, ice cream, and various other goodies. It also serves another, more important, purpose: going into HYPER makes you invulnerable for a short period of time. While this is of little consequence on its own, this is the only way to kill the little gray critters that inhabit the planets. The end result is that killing gray critters, eating orbs, killing bosses, and eating treats are what nets you a large score, which means you want to be in HYPER as long as possible.

There are a few problems with Magic Planet Snack. The first is that orbs are sometimes hard to distinguish from their surrounding environment. With a little practice it is easy to notice them, but if you do not figure it out it becomes quite the annoyance trying to find the orbs. The second is the sound. While the music and sounds are decent, they are mixed strangely, resulting in weird volume problems such as the music at the title being much louder than the music in the game itself.

The major gameplay issue is the lack of variety in scenery and scoring. Sure, you go to different planets and they change in size and the concentration of baddies, but there's no real change to the planets. They all look the same, which is a little tedious, and the scoring revolves entirely around the HYPER system. Some alternate ways to score would be nice, given that the only real way to play is to just collect orbs. That's a little boring for your average person if that's the entire goal of the game. Having more enemies with different behaviors inside the planet, such as drillers or embedded mines, would be a massive improvement.

The end result of all of this is that Magic Planet Snack is a fantastic game with a few issues. It may get a bit boring after your first play through, but it's a game that you can come back to and play for a while to relax. The saccharine sweetness of the visuals and story mixed with easy-to-learn mechanics make this a game for anybody and everybody, and is highly recommended no matter your age. You can download the game from the developer's site and provide feedback through the TIGSource feedback thread.

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