’Snake’ games have been around for a while, operating on a simple idea: You start out with a small character, but it gets larger or longer as you gather items. This makes it increasingly difficult to avoid enemies, so sooner or later you’ll get hit and it’s game over; the genre is meant for quick doses of simple fun. Viral Survival takes most of its cues from Snake games, though it gives you more options to defend yourself in order to encourage running up a high score. Played from an overhead view and controlled with your choice of Nunchuk + Wiimote, Classic Controller, or GameCube pad, Viral Survival offers a fairly polished take on the genre for $5; it’s a fair price.

There isn’t much in terms of a story; what little there is consists of your little blob of a character running around the stage picking up colored DNA strands, which will attach to it and follow you around. The longer your strand chain is, the more points you get and the more effective several power-ups are. On the other hand, longer chains are harder to protect from the roaming virus enemies; if they hit the chain they scatter it so you have to recover the strands, and if they hit your character then the game is over.

While your defeat is virtually inevitable, Viral Survival wants you to at least put up a good fight and gives you a few ways to do so. In most modes it’s entirely possible to jump over incoming virus enemies, or use various power-ups to attack them with scattering explosions or even become invulnerable for a short time, turning it into something like Pac-Man. There is even one mode where your character constantly shoots projectiles that can kill these enemies, and this is in fact the whole point of the mode. Regardless, you’re probably going down sooner or later and you’ll be ranked on how long you lasted as well as how high a score you racked up.

Viral Survival has five modes of play, though they are mostly variations on the basic idea; one mode zooms in extremely close so you can’t see anything beyond the immediate area around your character, another times you on how quickly you get a certain number of strands, and so on. These add at least a little variety to the game, and if any one mode doesn’t appeal to you then perhaps another will.

At its core, Viral Survival is a pretty basic game. It’s definitely a variant on the Snake genre, albeit with more things to do and a little more polish to it. Meant for simple fun (I almost want to call it a ’casual game’, but it’s only that in the same sense that the likes of Tetris are), Viral Survival is something played in short bursts whenever you just want to kill a little time. If that appeals to you, then this game is both easy to learn and reasonably priced at $5/500 Wii Points, so it’s worth a look.