Developer: Finn Morgan
Steam Release: Sep 2011
Hours Played: 3
Similar To: Colour Symphony / Defy Gravity
Rating: 1/5 Parsnips
In Colour Bind you control a two-wheeled vehicle and like most precision platformers your aim is to learn from your mistakes before speed-running a level in the best possible time. You are given 50 standard levels to complete and, like Defy Gravity, it has you considering the consequence of gravitational pulls and how to manipulate the environment to ultimately reach the portal. You move left, right and jump. Surrounding you are different coloured circles and shapes that are subject to their own colour-coded gravitational pulls. For example, red circles may drift upwards while green ones are pulled down but you might also get yellow or blue ones that are pulled sideways. It's a very topsy-turvy world. A lot of the time is about getting the vehicle or the circles to collide with switches to change gravity.
As well as getting to grips with the gravitational pulls, you'll also need to get used to the speed and control of your vehicle. This is no Super Meat Boy where you travel quickly and zip around like a bouncy ball. Here, movement and control is delicate and subtle where your top-speed still has you trundling along slowly and where you have to sometimes slow down in order to initiate a decent jump. Jumping, by the way, sees your wheels puff out and inflate. Overall, Colour-Bind supplies the player with a decent amount of entertainment and this is helped by the way it records best times. The design of the levels is also good but it does get hard quite soon and may well have average players perusing YouTube clips by around the level 15 mark. Not so good.
Although I was impressed with the stability of the high-scores and meaningful stats, they weren't particularly well-produced. We're talking plain white text on a black background. As well as the usual paths such as Options and an excellent Leaderboards section, you are shown how many levels out of 50 you have completed in the top right hand corner of the main screen. You're also shown how many bronze, silver and gold medals you have achieved. Clicking Play takes you to a list of those 50 levels which you scroll through. As they are highlighted you are shown the medals you have gained at the top along with the target-time for the next medal. You are also shown your best time and can even click on a replay icon to view your best run. Finally, despite the game insisting that it has a kick-ass soundtrack, it's more of a gentle ambient twang.
Colour Bind encourages you to improve by allowing you to see how you compare with other players. At the leaderboard your best time is not only displayed with a position or rank on how you fair globally, but how much better you are than others as a percentage. For example, my best levels are Level 7 and 16. In the former I am positioned 156th and am better than 95.96% of other players and in the latter I'm 133rd and better than 93.72% of other players. It may be a brag but in almost every level I've done, I am better than 80% of all players or perhaps most players are happy solving the level rather than going for a good time. Still, this type of record keeping is what you want in a precision platformer and it's all done very well.
CONCLUSION
Although the game gives you cryptically subtle hints when starting a level, the game gets difficult very quickly. It is not a breeze or a walk in the park and will certainly give you a challenge. You'll often have to take a step back and stare at the screen for long periods in order to figure things out. (Either that or the YouTube option.) Personally, I preferred working out and completing early levels rather than gettig tripped up by the perplexing later levels which get fairly impenetrable by Level 20. Perhaps splitting the game into two sections (like normal and hard) would at least have had us beginners merrily aiming to complete one half of the game and having some sense of achievement. Give Colour Bind a try when it appears in the sale by all means but it's not one that most gamers will dig deeply enough into to warrant paying full price.
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