Neon Warp Reviews

150 levels, less than 2 euros, this puzzle game is not easy at all. Maybe it is me who is bad at playing Neon Warp or maybe this game is done for people who are more intelligent than me. What you have to do ? It is to color all the tiles from the game in one color (the one shown at the beginning of the level). It sounds pretty easy but it is not because when you change a square, another or some other ones are having a new color too. The solution is probably to read the rules.

Ech... so it's not strictly bad or anything, but it's very... simple. As in, the puzzles feel a little braindead, less think-it-out and more trial-and-error. It's really close to being a good puzzle system, but it just misses the mark.

I had more issues with this game than I thought I would, it was a struggle to understand at first because the developer didn't put any degree of tutorial in so you're left to figure it out yourself. The game has enough content though to allow for that learning but it's still a bit more complex than at first glace. Good challenging puzzle game, recommend to anyone who likes a challenge.

Just a simple, relaxing little puzzle game with cool, equally-simple colors and visuals.

Recommending with a lot of caution. It's a minimalistic puzzle game with nifty mechanics and a good amount of content and challenge, so those into that sort of thing should check it out. However there are some design choices I find questionable and which keep this from being, you know, actually great. - Each puzzle comes with a move limit, three-star performance being often the optimum (even if it is possible to go even below this) but even one-star performance is pretty close to the optimum, so there really isn't much room for error. And if you don't get even that one star, the puzzle is not considered solved and no further puzzles unlock. - Solving a puzzle unlocks only the next one. No skipping, no multiple branches, if you get stuck with a puzzle you are stuck with it until you solve it. - No undo, and with tough move limits it means that if you make any accidental false move, you basically have to reset every time because there's no room for correcting the false move. Together these factors make the game often too much a grind, easing the imperfectly solved move limits and unlocking a bit more puzzles at the same time would make the game more enjoyable while still not compromising the level of challenge...

Interesting puzzle game. Only have 3 colors to work with, but it gets tricky on exactly how to manipulate them to what you want them to be. Most levels aren't that hard to solve, but getting 3 stars on every level can be a bit of a challenge given you often have to complete boards in the fewest moves possible. Pretty satisfying to get to the end of the levels. Time trial is perhaps a bit too hard to get the achievements on, especially given the boards are random. Maybe lighten the requirements a bit or not having random boards on each run.

An attempt to create a digital rubic's cube, only simplified to the point that it doesn't hit the mark properly to be any fun. The game is cheap and I got it almost for free, but even so I can't recommend a game that doesn't make its player enjoy his time with it.

While the overall feel of the game is decent, it will likely take some trial and error to figure out how exactly things work. I don't believe the buttons or keys are ever stated and I have found no undo button, just one for "exit level" and another for "restart level". Honestly, if not for one key thing, I would probably just be fine with this game. That thing is progression. It's no wonder that less than 2% of players have completed 5 levels. While it is not abnormal for a game like this to have a star ranking of level completion, it is abnormal for a game like this to refuse to let you progress unless you meet a certain threshold in each level. I would be fine with it if the game either unlocked the next level upon completion regardless of the score, gated some levels by an aggregate score amount, or even restarted the level / gave an alert once the player was at the point where they would not be able to unlock the next level. But instead the player seems expected to be almost constantly aware of this threshold and their current status. Hell, I would probably even be more forgiving if it had an undo button so it didn't force the player to start over from square one. Unless you are confident in your puzzling abilities, I recommend you stay away from this game despite the price. Honestly, if you are confident in your puzzling abilities then this probably won't be worth the money anyway since it doesn't have much that stands out. A number of the levels aren't even particularly hard, it's just that there is barely a difference between the perfect number of moves and not being allowed to progress sometimes.

I usually love puzzle games, no matter how difficult, simple or complex they are... but they need to be fun, and this game is not, in my opinion. I find this game non intuitive. The goal is to solve the puzzles with the least amount of moves. They are hard... but not "fun hard", just "annoying hard". Maybe it's just the controls (they annoy me most of the time), or maybe is the implementation. In any case, can't recommend this game.

[i]This review was posted in 2017 with 37min playtime and in 2022 I went back to 100% the game for 20 more excruciating hours since it was one of the last unfinished games on my account. My opinion of the game has not changed a lot, but I've updated my review at the bottom.[/i] Neon Warp has a simple mechanic and is hard as nails. What kills all the fun is the poor implementation though. There is no proper tutorial, so the first stages were just me fumbling around, trying to wrap my head around the rules. There is a grid of squares in 3 different colours. You are supposed to turn them into a single target colour. First you pick a starting square. Then you move to adjacent squares. If you move between 2 differently coloured squares, the target square turns the third colour. I'll be honest, I didn't enjoy the base mechanic, but I don't fault the game for that. There is clearly a target audience, as evidenced by the ~3.5% of players who have unlocked all achievements. It just happens to not be me, even though I love most other logic and movement puzzle games. What I will fault the game for is the very poor and unforgiving design. It forces you to complete a level within a certain number of moves. Even the lowest of 3 bars is very close to the minimum amount of moves, meaning you have to play near-optimally to even clear a level. Unfortunately the game only unlocks the next level once you beat the previous one. There is no skipping mechanic, no way to take a break from a level and advance elsewhere. If you ever get stuck, you're forced to beat your head against a wall. And you better plan out all your moves ahead, even on large grids, because there is no way to undo a move. Make one careless turn at the end and you'll probably have to restart the whole level due to having made too many moves. To give a sense of scope: Level 13 out of 150 had to be cleared in 26-34 moves, which is already starting to get pretty complex. I can't access later levels, but the 12 levels I beat were quite repetetive and I found myself bored of the unchanging rules and mechanics by the end. The store screenshots make it seem there are more mechanics in later stages, but I never got there and can't skip ahead to check them out. Whenever I tabbed away or minimized the window I had to restart the game because the screen was full of graphical glitches rendering it unplayable. If you play on keyboard, never touch the mouse as even simply moving the cursor without clicking will move your square around! Neon Warp is a one-trick pony that gets old fast. I was a bit frustrated with the game's difficulty for sure, but more than that I felt dissapointed at the game design and bored with the mechanic. I never really warmed up to the game. And it doesn't seem to be just me, looking at the global achievement stats: ~27% of players have completed 1 level perfectly. ~12% have cleared 5 levels (perfect or not). So within the first 5 levels, more than half the players gave up! Only ~6% did 10 levels perfectly (me included). And from there on we're pretty much down to the hard core of ~3.5% who unlocked everything. If you think you're among those 3.5% this game is probably great for you! It has a ton of content with 150 pre-made levels and several time-attacks. All that for a pretty fair price (especially on sale). If you think you're not among this group - hands off! There are so many more accessible and enjoyable puzzle games than this! [b]Update from 2022:[/b] It has been almost 5 years since I put down Neon Warp in frustration. Immediately after returning I was reminded just how terribly inelegant and obtuse this game is. Lots of back-and-forth, lots of restarts and brute-force, zero guidance since you can start on any tile. The target numbers seem to have very little relation to the actual level layouts, they're not like "best solution", "some errors", "easy solution". Sometimes a logical solution is dozens of moves above the lowest target, blocking you from advancing. And other times you can easily beat the hardest target by more than 10 moves. It's just unforgiving and poorly balanced. Even worse you can't iterate on past solution - there is neither an undo, nor are some levels even solvable if you happen to start on the wrong tile. I can now confirm that there are a total of 2 special mechanics (colouring adjacent tiles and colour-override). The last gets introduced at level 24 and then it's just more of the same until level 150. But at least the size and complexity of levels doesn't go up linearly (as I had feared) and there are still some very short and obvious levels even among giant terrible >70-moves lategame levels. I have now fully cleared the game, I've even written a 100% guide for it. I still can't really recommend Neon Warp and I'm glad I never have to play it again.