by Ah, yes. Chroma Squad–another game sadly lowered from Tier 1 to Tier 2.
It’s hard to quickly pin down the problems with Chroma Squad–in fact, there’s a lot of things that are great about it. I mean, we’ve got…
- Generously customizable mock-power ranger team creation
- A light-hearted atmosphere that leads to shenanigans
- A bear who does the dance of death
- A customizable Zord built out of cardboard boxes
- A surprisingly tactical combat system & character stat/skill/equipment customization mechanics
- A reasonably challenging final boss at the end
- Powerups in the forms of hiring different advertising companies
- Optional “quests” in the form of director’s instructions
So with all this greatness, where did things go wrong? How could they have gone wrong?
I think somewhere along the way, the game lost its focus. It’s sort of like a rope with one end that’s been fused, and one end that’s been frayed. The game begins on the fused end–tight, compact, great ideas, solid presentation–but the longer you travel down the rope (er… game) each individual unit of fiber that once cohesively created a whole begins to unravel and spread off in its own direction. The game mechanics start to feel a bit sloppy. The story begins to feel mushy and aimless. The shenanigans start to feel forced or worse, included out of obligation instead of a desire for humor.
Once again I stress, that it’s difficult to pin down the exact problem–but I will do my best to address a few of them.
The Zord battle mechanics are the easiest to describe out of the lot. While the battles themselves look relatively flashy, you never really have to A. Invest resources in your Zord (in spite of there being an extensive Zord-building/customization section of the game) B. Think at all in Zord combat. Zord combat revolves around a combo system that rewards the player with more damage each time they make a hit. It also grants them another turn each time they land a hit. Landing a hit is dependent on watching a slider move back and forth on a bar and stopping the slider when it enters the “hit” range of the bar (you’ve likely seen something similar in other games before). So, as long as you continually stop the slider inside the “hit” section of the bar, you get a damage bonus and you get to take another turn. See the problem here? Zord fights (of which there are many) consist of boringly walking into the fight, attacking a near-infinite number of times without your opponent getting to respond, and finishing them off with a finisher move. The first few times it was novel, but quickly became dull–worsened by the aforementioned wasted Zord upgrade screen, since HP, damage, skills etc. don’t really matter if you can just use your basic attack to attack forever.
Crafting is unreliable and a bit of a joke, which is hilarious considering the amount of time that was put into it. Items “recycle” into various tier of materials with a random percentage chance of what/how much you’ll get, essentially turning them into unreliable loot boxes (wherein some scenarios they literally drop nothing). Materials cannot be directly purchased, but must be acquired through random item drops, recycling, or the purchase of boxes that give you random materials. In any other game, this might be considered an annoying but permissible fashion of item/crafting grinding–the kind that is prevalent in many games. However, I need to remind you that Chroma Squad plays true to the hard-and-fast rules of legacy Fire Emblem, in that it is a grid-based tactical game with a finite amount of resources, enemies, exp (in Chroma Squad, fans) etc. To add a mechanic with such a high degree of variance into Chroma Squad make investment in it frustrating and difficult at the best of times.
But let’s say you did invest in the crafting system? What are your rewards? Ultimately the chance at better items, right? I would be inclined to agree with you, if it weren’t for the fact that the shop sells fixed items that are either on par with what is available to craft, or at times, much better. This makes crafting feel rather pointless, in spite of what must have been a large investment in the process on the part of the developers (they even made a menu where you can smoosh old crafting items into higher tiered ones). The only advantage I could foresee being obtained from crafting is a chance at a random attribute being added to a piece of equipment that might be slightly better tailored to one of your characters as opposed to a shop item. Even then, the rarer crafting materials (which you’ll need to obtain many of to produce anything remotely good) are difficult and unreliable to obtain.
The worst part by far though, is the pandering of the developers to the game’s kickstarters. Now look, I appreciate kickstarters. I’m sure the developers appreciate and have good reason to appreciate kickstarters. In every single game I’ve played up to this point, I have never hated kickstarters. This game has made me hate kickstarters.
With every single thing you do in this game–with every single turn–you are constantly reminded that this game was brought to you by kickstarters. During the character customization screen, you are told that some of the human templates are kickstarters. You get emails in the game constantly, from kickstarters. You rescue kickstarters. You encounter kickstarters. Kickstarters join your team. Kickstarters fix plot point problems. Kickstarters. Are. EVERYWHERE. Look, there’s nothing wrong with supporting your kickstarters. I’m all for it. Easter Eggs, thank-you’s at the end of the game, maybe even the occasional general shoutout is even fine–but this almost reaches a point where it’s not a Power Rangers spoof. It’s a kickstarter spoof. And it becomes extremely annoying.
If the game had been a kickstarter spoof game, then this might be hilarious, or at least mildly novel. I’m sure there’s probably already a game out there that has done this, but a game that raised money from kickstarting that was a game about raising money for kickstarting might be worth exploring. The problem is, this is a game about customization. It is a game about injecting yourself into the world and making it your own. You customize each member of your team; you customize their color, their name, their catch phrases, their battle cries, their weapons, skills and equipment. I personally settled on recreating the cast of Yu-Gi-Oh!, where each time the Squad summoned their Zord, they shouted “I Summon A Monster in Attack Position” whereupon their finisher was “Blue Eyes! White Lighting!” I wanted to play a silly little game where my mock-cast of Yu-Gi-Oh! ran around doing silly things. And they did… a little bit.
The problem however was the same problem as Wesley from STTNG. Every single time things felt like they were moving forward, flowing in a good direction and building a cohesive fantasy reality around the bonds of the characters, suddenly “HAY GAIZ! I’M KCICKSTRTR L337 H4XX0R L0Rd137 AND I’M HERE TO SAVE THE DAY! I LIEK NACHOS AND COMPUTER GAIMZ!” Once or twice, these kinds of easter eggs are okay or even enjoyable, but the everlasting torrent that is the kickstarter swarm in this game creates so much noise that it drowns out everything else. I understand that the devs want to give something back to those that supported them, but I’m sorry, because at the end of the day, I don’t really care who they are or what they did. I’m not here to pay homage to your kickstarters, I’m here to play a game where, admittedly self-servingly, I am the hero. Instead, it feels like I’m being constantly reminded that I didn’t bribe my way into being included in the game.
That bitterness along with the loss of focus as the game progresses makes it hard to accept as being a Tier 1 game, and makes it teeter dangerously close to Tier 3. However, the final boss fight tipped the scales back into green of Tier 2 in that it felt actually challenging and required full use of all skills and techniques (both in and out of game) in order to succeed. Overall, it’s not too shabby for an indie game, and while I wished for much more, what we got wasn’t completely awful.
