Chromatic::/Resonance Reviews

much chrome, such resonance

I resonated with this game, looking forward to lightrgb 2 The Electric boogaloo.

Great game, I am abit biased but a refreshing take on the bullet heaven genre.

Fun and chill survivors-like bullet-hell autobattler with excellent beats in the background. Sometimes you gotta sweat a bit but mostly I can enter my zen zone and just bash some celestial RGB circles with cool particle effects. There's enough meta progression to keep me hooked as well, plenty of stuff to unlock from achievements, to characters, permanent stat upgrades and some kind of bounty system ala achievements but you get currency for them. Will return to this one, got hooked for nearly two hours straight but I need some beauty sleep.

This game is way too difficult, but also way too fun. I'm eagerly awaiting the day someone beats max darkness difficulty, I can't even beat darkness 69 (nice).

Fun game! Mixes auto-shooter, roguelike, and shmup, like it says on the tin. Dodging can get pretty dicey once the bullets start to fly, but you have more control than usual for an auto-shooter in the form of three abilities: - Overclock, basically an Estus flask that lets you regain twenty health every sixty seconds - Color switching: use bullets the same color as your enemies to do more damage. Later on, this can get partially superceded by your build with the addition of Darkness and Radiant damage types in addition to the basic RGB. - Boost, which makes you go zoom on a recharging meter After your first run, you can upgrade your base parameters, which will let you proceed further with every attempt. The weapon variance is really solid, and I felt a significant difference in gameplay depending on my build over multiple runs. On my first run, I got a series of Radiance abilities that shot lighting after me--one of the upgrades was called Vajra--and sent shooting stars in random directions around me. I upgraded the core gun along straightforward lines, giving it more speed, damage, piercing, and causing it to trigger explosions after defeating foes. I relied on Boost to escape foes but didn't upgrade it and lost after getting overwhelmed around Stage 15. On another run, I went with mines called Stations that turned out to be worth their weight in gold. At first they were just mines, but soon I got abilities that caused them ALL to create explosions whenever one was triggered and, critically, caused me to regenerate health at ludicrous speed whenever I hovered on one. Combined with unrelated upgrades that let me shoot projectiles weaker, but in a ring around myself, one that shot my projectile velocity through the roof, and one that synergized with it to create powerful explosions on every hit, this was the first run I managed to clear. The final boss was a challenge but no match for my mines. I was a little concerned about legibility, and when the screen gets very busy it can be a concern, but overall the game was a lot easier to follow than I'd feared. The simple primary colors, obvious player character, and simple fact that things moving _towards_ you will probably hurt but nothing that's yellow is ever a threat rendered the action a pretty easy to parse in the end. I never completely lost track of my character or what was going on. At the time of this review right after release, I experienced a few bugs and oddities, like the selector for the Quit button on the main menu going off the screen, and some menus not interacting in quite the ways I expected. However, gameplay was silky smooth (on a high-end rig from about a decade ago) and I didn't encounter any serious technical difficulties. Clearing a run unlocks a number of additional options that look like they'll be fun for diehards, including a surprising number of additional "archetypes" (essentially, characters, in something like Vampire Survivors) and a trove of difficulty-increasing options for if you're a masochist. If you're looking for something like Vampire Survivors or (very specifically) the similar bonus mode in Nikke, this game can scratch that itch with a bit more of an action-oriented flair. I can't speak to its longevity, but I had fun in my time with it, and based on how much is left to unlock, I think I've barely scratched the surface.

I highly recommend. I find myself locked-in for most of the sessions because you really need to keep the attention to avoid losing the waves. Despite the assets being quite basic, it was something that was apt for this genre. The bullet-hell mess is particularly aesthetically pleasing for me, but perhaps the colors can be of a slightly pleasing palette (although that'd defeat the light-physics theme) Although there wasn't a story or narrative, I felt myself wanting to understand my role in the game, and perhaps the developer could consider this. The music and SFX is good, and the best part of it are the explosions. It is super replayable, as there are many difficulty levels that you can customize. However, the incentives to do that are quite minimal, as typically I'd love to have greater rewards for punishing myself. There were absolutely no bugs / glitches / optimization problems and performance all-round was great. The game was of a moderate difficulty and was challenging at some points. It is also super value for money. 9/10