Negative Gamer Review: Chime (Xbox Live Arcade)

Puzzle games are a secret desire of mine. My childhood was filled with numerous Tetris competitions between me and my parents and their friends. I couldn’t get the sight of dropping tetrominoes out of my head. I was well and purely obsessed with the game. I thought you couldn’t make a better puzzle game than Tetris. Then years later I played Lumines. I fell in love on instant contact with that game. The music, the puzzle mechanic, the visuals…they all appealed to me so much for some reason. I had a new puzzle obsession and it was incredible.

Imagine my ecstasy when I heard that a game mixing elements of these incredible titles was made available on Xbox Live. Believing it to be equivalent of the second coming of Jesus, I hopped on my 360 and downloaded Chime, the first downloadable title from developer Zoë Mode. This puzzle game uses tetrominoes to color the playfield while trance music plays along with the placement of the blocks. Sound familiar?

Similar Yet Different All At Once

On the Tetris side of the equation, Chime uses tetromino-style blocks. Each song/level utilizes a different set of blocks to add variety; some levels will have crosses and L blocks while others will have U and square-shaped blocks. Naturally, the next block to be placed is shown at the top of the screen. Much more of the gameplay mimics the themes of Lumines. Placing blocks together nets you a “quad” which is at least three-by-three blocks big. The quads can get bigger by adding more blocks to the ever-expanding rectangle. Quads are eliminated when a “beat line” passes over them in time with the music. Each quad you eliminate adds to your score multiplier at the top of the screen.

Here’s where things start to divert from the puzzle games of the past. As quads are eliminated, two things happen. One, the area taken up by the quad is colored in. This is called coverage and it’s used to determine how you get time bonuses. Two, any excess blocks attached to the quads that aren’t eliminated remain with a kind of countdown timer on them. After four passes of the beat line, the blocks will begin to blink. If you don’t eliminate the blinking blocks before the beat line passes over a final time, all excess blocks are erased and you lose your score multiplier.

All of these elements come together to create a truly unique and thrilling puzzle experience. You spend most of your time trying to get the entire board colored while still maintaining your multiplier by making quads of the excess block pieces. All of that goes on while some fantastic house music is played in the background. Moby, Orbital, Paul Glass, Markus Schulz and Fred Deakin all have a song for the game and their house music background gives this game its amazing aural style. Add to it the gorgeous Geometry Wars-esque visuals and the ability to make music with the blocks you drop and you have a simply gorgeous game.

All that aside, some of you might be disappointed in how sparse the game is. There are only two game modes to choose from (free play and timed) and only five songs to choose from. Each timed match can go for three, six or nine minutes. There’s also the arbitrary Xbox Live leaderboards that games like this have to have. With no DLC in its future it looks like there are only the songs included to play around with. If Zoe Mode has any sense they’ll make some more songs for this game as the lack of features is the only thing keeping this game from perfection.

Luckily the game costs only 400 MS moonbucks and everything that’s included is so fucking fun and engaging. You won’t really mind playing “Brazil” through the 60th or 70th time and with the various time limits you can sit down for a few quick boards. You could also just play Freeplay, which can act like a music maker (if you’re industrious enough).

A few other points worth mentioning:

• A minimum of 60% of the proceeds for the game go towards the charity OneBigGame. If nothing else, get this game to support this fine organization.
• Each song has a different grid board to work with, ranging from a simple block to a smiley face.

More than any other game that I’ve reviewed for this site, I will recommend Chime to every gamer I come across. Even if you never found Tetris to be all that engaging, or you’ve never found time to play a round of Lumines, you will find some sort of enjoyment out of this game. You’ll be doing yourself a huge favor by downloading this.

You might like this game if…
…you’re looking for the next big thing in puzzle games, or if you’re just feeling charitable.

Final Score

Though sparse, you won’t come across a better puzzle game than this.

(What does this score mean?)