Nukezilla Review: Chemical Chaos (XBLIG)

Chemical Chaos

There’s something very challenging about reviewing Indie Games. In some ways you have to remove your personal preference of game type and try and be a little bit more objective. Yes, of course it’s about my personal opinion of a game, but sometimes you find a game that is technically good, but not something you’d ever want to play personally.

So here’s Faux Robo’s Chemical Chaos (available here for 80 MSP), an interesting puzzle game that uses the idea of infection as its core game mechanic. It’s quite hard to describe, but essentially your job is to spread the ‘virus’ through the assembled molecules. You start off with the top left molecule active and from there you use the colours on the controller buttons (and pink for the shoulder buttons) to infect any other adjacent, matching colours. Get that?

So, for example: You start off on a yellow. To infect the nearest red, you press B (red) and that new red and your original yellow are red. Next, you press X (blue) because there’s a blue one next to you, say. Using your variation of colours you have to get every molecule one colour within 30 attempts, or in another mode, a specific single colour. It sounds much more complicated than it is but the fact that it took me two paragraphs to effectively explain the game’s mechanics is a little troublesome.

There’s three game modes: single player, which is the standard, timed mode (which is the same but with a time limit) and colour mode, where you have to finish on a specific colour. There’s also a 2-player local multiplayer.

As you play, you find yourself carefully planning your moves, looking for specific colours and trying to see the links. Having only 30 turns means that you need to be careful with what you do. If you just bash buttons madly (which, of course, I initially did) you will lose.

You also cotton on pretty quickly in rounds where there’s no chance you can actually win, meaning that restarting half-way through is a fairly frequent event. This main mode is quite leisurely; you can sit and think about what you’re doing, making sure you’re being as efficient as possible.

Add a timer to the proceedings and things become a little more… frantic. Instead of measured action you button-bash a little more, trying to get all of the molecules infected within 45 seconds, yet you’ve still only got 30 turns. In this mode you also get a test matching the colours to the buttons, kind of like when a word says red, but is actually blue. This makes it doubly hard (for me at least; perhaps I’m just dumb?) as you’re not just trying to find the colours, you’re also trying to associate your finger movements to the buttons.

The last gametype, colour mode, is the biggest challenge. Not only are you limited by your 30 turns, you also have to finish on a specific colour. This becomes incredibly frustrating as often you won’t know if you can finish until you reach the end of the infecting. Once you get it, it’s quite satisfying but it will probably take you a fair while to achieve. Or, again, I might just be rubbish.

As for the other, usual things (graphics, story etc) there’s not much to say. It has basic vector graphics that are pleasing enough but nothing that great, especially compared to Faux Robo’s last game that I (funnily enough) reviewed which was rather nice looking. The story is non-existent and the music is chirpy and light, but nothing spectacular. There’s also a highly irritating laugh every time you press a menu item which forced me to turn the sound off.

Like I said at the start of this review, this game isn’t for me. But that doesn’t make it a bad game. I can at least appreciate that if you’re into puzzle games where you have to really think about your actions then you might enjoy it. It has a certain degree of intelligence and thought put into it; the idea of the spreading the virus is very cool and it takes that and puts it into a effective (if hard to explain) game.

Personally I don’t have enough of an attention span to play it, especially the harder modes which totally frazzled my brain, but if you like these sorts of titles, it’s a fun little Indie Game that’ll keep your brain working.