There are certain games that may be a bit too quirky for comfort, but they turn out to be gems in the end. Some are morbid, while others are a bit disgusting. Snoticles is a game featuring characters made from snot, hence the name. They shoot projectiles at each other like soldiers at war, but they’re still undesired body fluids.

Among its strongest traits are the cartoon visual style and the emphasis on disgusting body fluids as the main characters. The way it’s portrayed isn’t really disgusting, but more of humorous to the point of childishness, but in a good way. The characters you get to play with are named Zit, Dread, Spark, and Snot; they are out to defeat the Blot empire, who seek to take control of the world with deadly, if not disgusting force. The lighthearted presentation paves the way to some brilliant gameplay mechanics that shows complexity.

Objective for each level is to take out the alpha blot, but it’s being protected by grunt blots that you have to take out using your projectiles. You aim by drawing out trajectory for one of your characters to shoot. Each character has a different mode of attack; Zit throws rocks, Dread launches bombs, Spark shoots fireballs, and Snot spits his own phlegm towards the target. Each snoticle has limited ammo, so you have to use them well in each level and use as few shots as possible to get the alpha blot. There are other things you can do as well, like get Zit’s rocks back if you bounce them off in a certain way around the screen.

The physics engine may need a bit of tweaking though as it suffers the same problem as the others of projectiles slowing down to a halt. The same problem can be seen with other projectile games like the popular Angry Birds, wherein the birds would need to grind down to a full stop in order to have you proceed with the game, which can take seconds that could have been used to do something else in the game. This does give you incentive to never miss a shot though as such behavior are mostly exhibited by missed projectiles, so perhaps it’s a good thing as well to get good at it.

Another unfortunate thing is that there are only sixty levels in this game, which means determined players can go through them in one or two sittings if inclined to. There isn’t as much content to satisfy the addiction one can get with this game. Past the childish humor, you can get pretty good gameplay with this game, although not much as much replay value as most may desire. Perhaps there will be updates or sequels to feature more levels in the future as it would be a waste not to do so, especially since it’s almost always necessary for iOS games these days.

Snoticles is a fun game with its own quirks and cool features, making it a contender for the coveted casual game throne that has been with Angry Birds and other such games for so long. If not, at least we can be secure with the fact that the casual game formula is steadily improving. This game has succeeded in hitting what casual games are supposed to be about.