Spy Chameleon - RGB Agent Reviews

A really interesting twist on your average top down stealth game. An intricate color changing feature adds tons of possibilities to puzzles and speed runs. At some moments incredibly difficult, you will most certainly get plenty of game play out of it. No real story but quirky missions that did make me laugh. The color boxes are a bit unforgiving but possible.

A pretty simple color-changing game. I like the premise, and it is well-executed. I recommend it for anyone in the mood for a puzzle-oriented top-down game. It's not very complex, though, and there's no story besides hints of your mission, which only come up as brief text on cards describing the next game area. You don't even see any of the character's you're getting dirt on. With it being so simple and not really having much to "disappear into", I suggest waiting for a sale.

A well-designed game that completionists would surely appreciate. Beating all the timer trials took quite some effort but it's been fun all the way through.

It's a pearl. Challenging, sometimes frustrating, but always doable. Especially speedrunners can have their fun with the 75 levels. Each one is beatable within 6-30 seconds and there is even an achievement for playing through the entire game in less than 18 Minutes. But don't get fooled by this short time. You will have HOURS of fun with this game, figuring out how to beat some levels, finding the perfect solutions and collecting all the items.

Brilliant game! Clever level design and a super cool main mechanic - like another reviewer I can't believe somebody hasnt come up with the idea before :) Stealth with arcade precision timing and positioning gameplay.

I bought this purely from the image when scrolling through games to buy, who doesn't like chameleons and thieving? Overall an enjoyable game if a little easy, with nice animation and simple controls I'd recommend it. Here's hoping for another with more options in play & story (the last level really got me!!)

Spy Chameleon is a puzzle game where you are a chameleon who has five missions to conduct "spy-like" actions: take some pictures of a famous person, steal secrets, hack a computer system. Each mission has 14 levels leading up to that end of mission level. In each level you must stealthily make your way to the end collecting flies along the way. Once you reach the end, another play through will show some ladybugs, usually in hard to reach locations, that you can grab as a snack. As a chameleon, you have the ability to change color to blend into your surroundings. Early on this isn't required, but later in the game, you will need to move from colored location to colored location avoiding the light cones of the guards. While the game is technically a puzzle game, if I had to classify it I would call it a top down platformer - if there is such a thing. In order to do more than burn through the level, i.e. speed run or grab the ladybugs, timing and color switching (by pressing buttons like you would jump with a platformer) with precision. I only played through the normal levels. The developers had to add a normal setting because too many people were complaining about the difficulty of the original (now called hard) default setting. Don't let the cartoony graphics fool you - this isn't a child's game. It may appeal to puzzle players (there is no penalty for getting caught other than the timer keeps going) and to platform players.

Awesome game! I hardly ever go for indie titles or casual games, but this one is a total anomaly! With damn near infinite replay value thanks to the fly/time/ladybug challenges plus a global leaderboard, this game has had me hooked since I picked it up 24 hours ago. Spy Chameleon has one of the best learning curves I've ever experienced in a game - many levels are made in a way that is easy enough to complete, but difficult to master, especially in the later stages. The difficulty very gradually goes up, to the point where you don't even really realize that it's getting more difficult until you're trying to break the world record and you fail 50 times. The main mechanic of the game isn't introduced all in the first 5 or 10 stages, which I believe is an extremely strong point. It gradually introduces new mechanics over each mission of 15 levels, so you aren't bombarded with new gimmicks but learn exactly how each new obstacle works and how it can be overcome. Spy Chameleon is one of the best games I've played in quite a while. It stand out in my mind for being so different, while pretty much nailing the difficulty curve and keeping the player interested. I very much recommend this game to everybody, easily worth the price!

I really wanted to like this game and it starts well enough, but about 1.5 hours in it devolves into asshole level design requiring pixel perfect movement (which is insane in a game with analog movement). At first this is mitigated by the quick restarts and frequent checkpoints so when you die you rarely lose more than 10 seconds. But the design only gets more dickish, in the end I spent 20 minutes on a single checkpoint that required pixel perfect, perfectly timed movement to simultaneously dodge 3 camera bots while pushing a block that was your only source of cover. You have to run around this crate pushing it an inch at a time before you run back to cover about 10 times in a row to complete the checkpoint and get caught on one corner for a fraction of a second and you're dead. That is not my idea of fun, I think it is tradgic that such a solid premiss with such a polished and inventive implementation can end up being so painful to play because the level designer didn't know when to quit. Only buy this if you are okay only playing the game for 1.5 hours and then never seeing the ending (or if you are a masochist, that's when the fun begins.)

Spy Chameleon - RGB Agent is stealthy in much the same way taking a sack full of hammers to the face is stealthy; while the perpetrator announces his assault beforehand with a vuvuzela blast. That is to say, it's not stealthy at all. Wow, that's a pretty rough opener for a supposed stealth game, eh? But you'll notice I still gave this one a thumbs up. To continue my metaphor, the stitching on the bag was just exquisite, the sound of the hammers crashing together was a tour de force, and the bits of my skull moved in ways that frankly astounded medical experts. Fortunately, I am the kind of guy who can appreciate these things. Though I'd have appreciated them more if they'd happened to somebody else. You see, as the living, breathing reason banks feel compelled to keep their pens attached to chains, I think of myself as something of an expert on stealth games. There's nothing I love more than stealth done right in video games. But what is a stealth game and why doesn't Spy Chameleon qualify? Well, a stealth game has you move through an area, usually attempting to accomplish some objective (say, take everything not nailed down) and leave without being seen. There's a danger of being caught and that requires some intelligence on the part of the challenges standing between you and your objectives. For a game to be a stealth game, it needs reactive enemies, otherwise it's just an obstacle course. And that's what Spy Chameleon is: a time trial, obstacle course, collect-a-thon game. Yes, it has the trappings of stealth. You play as the titular chameleon spy, you are told briefly that your goal is to steal a thing and shown a picture of the thing at the end of several levels, and the obstacles take the form of "enemies" with vision cones. But everything moves in perfect clockwork without reaction to your presence. Changing your color to "hide" is just another form of dodging a static obstacle. You'll notice stealth is even a Steam user tag. The devs themselves describe Spy Chameleon as: "a challenging arcade-puzzle game where the player needs to avoid being spotted thanks to the color-changing mechanisms of the main character." So, yeah, Spy Chameleon fails as a stealth game. But, now that that bone has been picked, if we judge it as an "arcade-puzzle game" or by my own moniker, "run-aroundy, collecty, obstacle torture time," then Spy Chameleon is an excellent example of its kind. Personally, I couldn't stand playing it, since I don't much care for time trial obstacle courses that play to my OCD desires to collect all the bits. But I have to admit, there's a Rube-Goldberg machine-like complexity to the levels and the timing required to solve them that makes them satisfying to complete. Like the sack of hammers, it's fundamentally solid in its design and its presentation is surprisingly nice. Spy Chameleon's soundtrack makes up for the game's lack of true infiltration by seeping it's bassy post-modern jazz into that part of your brain designed for looping catchy tunes. And thanks to the artists, my favorite part of the game was failing the levels (which is good because I failed a lot). Each failure shows you an image of the hazard that caught you: giant staring gold fish, trash-can robots spewing bold japanese writing, and the spy chameleon with a look of soul-wrenching embarassment for being caught about his naughty voyeuristic business. The art assets manage to convey a ton of character, and - as you'd expect for a game called RGB Agent - it's all in bright eye-catching primaries. Even the rather thematically dull environments: lab, office, storage rooms; are bright and good looking. It's just a shame the art designer's theory seems to stop at the visuals. The game looks like it has a ton of character. Even the very premise that we're specifically playing a chameleon who is a spy is appealing. But it never really goes anywhere with it. There's no narrative to speak of. Oh, you're told that you're trying to get a photo of some celebrity with their paramour or steal a work of art, but you just run 15 levels of obstacles and then see a picture of the thing you got. I'm not necessarily asking for War and Peace, or even any dialogue or text, but it feels like an opportunity was missed to tie all the whimsical characters together into some sort of cohesive story. That might have gotten me to love the game despite not enjoying the gameplay. And to better explain the gameplay: You control the chameleon from a top down view and you navigate a room full of hazards: field-of-view cones attached to enemies that move in a set pattern. If you touch a cone, you lose. In addition to just dodging the cones as they move, you can stand against colored objects in the background and not be "seen." Naturally, you've got the primary colors and the chameleon's natural green (i.e. 360 controller colors). Along the way you collect flies and ladybugs strewn about the level for points and to unlock more levels. You are, of course, challenged to beat a certain time. There are a few variations to these basic mechanics: switches to open doors, movable obstacles to block vision cones, etc. It is best to think about the levels as a puzzle, where the solution is where you move and finding the proper timing. The game has a sort of phone-game sensibility to it. You play a series of very short levels and get ranked at the end of them. It's clearly not a mobile port. It just has that arrangement. It's mostly flawless in its implementation. The only mechanical problem is that the chameleon's model obscures the parts of his body that are vulnerable to being seen. Only the trunk of his body seems to trigger a failure and his bulbous head and tail make it hard to see the exact point you can safely stand. That might seem a fussy complaint, but Spy Chameleon is a harsh time-trial collection hell. The difference between you getting your lovely leaderboard/completionist cheese and a big fat shock for losers in this particular rat maze is literally measured in thousandths of a second. Well, okay, it is measured in that, but just getting through will probably require you to operate on the scale of hundredths of a second. No big deal for you speed-run, obstacle course aficionados, I'm sure. That does lead to my other complaint. I found there's not really a good balance for the difficulty. It's a minor complaint since the game includes an easier mode and you can even skip levels that are giving you trouble, but it still stands. On the "normal" difficutly I found the game to be a really boring exercise in just going from point A to point B. Like connect-the-dots in full, glorious 3D. On hard, though, (which is the only difficulty that counts according to the game and its lusty achievements) I found the timing to be just outside of human reaction speed at points and my success was basically a matter of luck and treating my controller in a manner that would no doubt have it taken away from me by the authorities if they only knew. And that's Spy Chameleon: terrible stealth game. Good speed-run, puzzle, collection thing. I suppose it's been mislabeled since there aren't a lot of games that marry stealth and speed well and somebody's gonna want that. The only one I can think of is The Marvelous Miss Take (which looks a bit like Spy Chameleon, actually). If you want stealth and speed, play that. But don't overlook Spy Chameleon because it doesn't do stealth. Just be sure you're the kind of person that enjoys a sack of hammers to the face. Er, "challenging arcade-puzzle" game.