ChromaGun was a lot of fun. I am pretty picky about puzzle games because I find most of the time they try to be overly complex bordering onChromaGun was a lot of fun. I am pretty picky about puzzle games because I find most of the time they try to be overly complex bordering on pretentious. ChromaGun didn’t do that. I got stumped all of twice and was able to figure out how to proceed all on my own without guides or videos. The difficulty curve just felt well done as new types of puzzles are added often without any explanation, or with very little, yet they’re very intuitive and follow common sense. The humour is spot on and the person who voiced the overseer did a fantastic job. There isn’t much in the way of a story to ChromaGun but I didn’t really mind. The game has a great pace to it. Each room takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 5-10 minutes. Even if you don’t like the room you’re in it will be over pretty quickly and you’re on to the next one. I had only two major gripes with the game: one being that you couldn’t wipe colors and the other being a timed puzzle in the last level. The lack of ability to wipe away colors means that if you screw up you have to restart the room. This may not seem like a huge deal since the rooms don’t take a long amount of time to finish but it is still annoying and something that could have been avoided or fixed. As for that last level I wasn’t too angry. I hate timed missions on principle and I did have to restart the room multiple times trying to beat the clock but as I said before the inconvenience didn’t last long. The graphics are simple but well done. Most of the rooms are majority white so as to show off the colors of the paint but the droids are well done and the few bits of the game that has something to show off were good. There is good detail on fruit that is left on desks and the clothing on people for instance. The detail on peoples faces and on plants could have been better though.
I played ChromaGun on Linux. It never crashed on me at all. I didn’t notice any glitches or bugs. Alt-Tab didn’t work. It opened on the wrong monitor once but after that never did it again. The only graphics options are for resolution; motion blur; and a toggle for image effects. There is no manual save option. The game auto saves after each room is completed which works out well given the short time each room takes. I played version 2017.05.12 Build 120 of ChromaGun. It uses the Unity engine. It takes up 1104MB of disk space. During play my GPU usage was 27-66%; my VRAM usage was 797-900MB; my CPU usage was 2-21%; my RAM usage was 2.9-3.2GB and my framerate ranged from 71-126 FPS.
I recomend ChromaGun to anyone who enjoys games such as Portal. It lacks the story of Portal but the gameplay more than rises to the challenge. I finished the story mode in 4 hours and 40 minutes. I paid $13.99 CAD for the game and find that to be great value. Even $20 would have been worth it. There is a demo available that I implore people to try if you’re interested. The demo is Windows only but worked with Proton for me on Linux.
My Score: 8.5/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.3.4 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 19.0.0 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.5.2-1-MANJARO… Expand
