Slither.io

Slither.io is a massively online multiplayer game developed and published by Steve Howse for browsers and iOS in 2016, and ported to Android two days later by Lowtech Studios. Players control snakes that can move in any direction, which consume multi-colored pellets to grow in width and length, in a large circled area. The objective of the game is to become the longest snake in the arena, similar to the original Snake game which Slither.io is reminiscent of.

The game became extremely successful at launch with promotions from other YouTubers such as PewDiePie and ArcadeGo.com. The web version was ranked by Alexa as one of the 1,000 most visited sites by July 2016, while the iOS version has been topped as the most downloaded game in the App Store at the time.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) The bigger you grow, the wider you get and the slower you turn; it is the main factor that makes the game very hard to master. Because it isn't unusual that half of the snakes that can be found are big and the other half are small snakes, it is easy to crash into a small snake since they turn much faster and are more responsible to control than big snakes, meaning that they can easily hunt big snakes if they're not careful enough.
 * 2) The acceleration is a versatile trick that allows any player to kill other snakes at any time to eat the pellets they drop after they die and grow much faster than eating the pellets that spawn on the map.
 * 3) Absolutely stunning graphics and art-style. It already feels futuristic once the player starts the game. The glowing effect of the pellets and the highly colorful look of the game makes it entirely beautiful, even for a browser game made in 2016. With graphics as awesome as this, you wouldn't even say no to keep watching videos of the game online, or even play it.
 * 4) The gameplay also prioritizes strategies a lot too. You can circle other player to trap them inside you, leading them to crash into your body to explode into pellets for you to eat them as a result.
 * 5) It's also satisfying to watch big snakes crawling around the map as a small snake, which can make the game also focused on exploration in case you're not in the game to rack up high scores.
 * 6) There are a very large number of built-in skins available for use, including flag and YouTuber skins such as ArcadeGo, Slogoman, PewDiePie and others.
 * 7) In 2017, it got an update that added skin customization, a feature where you can create your own skin with almost completely customizable patterns. Other players can even see your own skin in-game.
 * 8) Shortly after its release and with its popularity, the game spawned a huge wave of .io games generally with the same consequence after dying, but with completely different gameplays, such as Diep.io and Mope.io. It did spawn plenty of clones, but some of them are actually amazing as well, like Wormate.io and Wormax.io.
 * 9) The game can get enhanced with extensions that serve as mods to improve the user interface, and add more features. This includes zooming for beginner and intermediate players with low reaction times, lower graphics, commands like leaving the game, more skins and an enhanced skin creator that allows more customization with the ability to change eye and pupil colors and antennas (however, those skins cannot be seen by other players).
 * 10) Even today, most servers in the game still reach the limit of 500 players with all of them being real human players for each, so the decline of the playerbase isn't a major problem to the game. However, this can lead to meeting the same players each time, recognizing their names.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Due to the game using very high ressources on the browser version, it struggles to run smoothly on low-end computers and keep the "high quality" setting that improves the lighting and shadows, leading to rampant lag and frame rate drops on these computers. The graphic settings also cannot be customized at all, and instead uses only two graphic settings: "low quality" and "high quality". Not even the lower graphics settings that are built in some mods help the game to run at a way better performance.
 * 2) *It fortunately isn't really the case for a large number of low-end Android tablets and phones, as the graphics are lowered down to make the porting work efficiently on that platform.
 * 3) It lacks other game modes than FFA like teams and survival, which led to the game losing replay value. This led to Slither.io declining in popularity drastically over time, dropping from a #262 rank on Alexa on June 25, 2016 to #9,499 on May 25, 2021.
 * 4) For whatever reason, you cannot add antennas (images/logos that some skins hold with a rope on top of their head) to custom skins, while this is possible to do by using certain mods. This might be because users could use any images for antennas which can lead to explicit pictures being shown to anyone on the game, but the developer could have come up with another solution. Also, you cannot use other faces for the snake (e.g Jelly face, depitcted with an open smiling mouth and closed eyes) and use custom eye colors like in the Deadpool skin that uses black eyes and white pupils to replicate Deadpool's eyes.

External link

 * Slither.io on Wikipedia