Spy Chameleon is a fast paid arcade style puzzle game and the latest Eshop release, interestingly yes; it really does offer something different for the Eshop consumer. I am a James Bond fan (Roger Moore to Pierce Brosnan, not the new stuff) so this plays into my interests well, it looks fun, but is it deep and does it offer a good game for the discerning Eshop consumer? Let’s see.
The premise is you are spy chameleon breaking into and passing through rooms avoiding detection in order to complete an over all mission, take a photo, steal some plans. The gameplay is fun, stealthy but also quick moving. You are given a sort of top down view and control your chameleon avoiding the view of cameras and robots (the view being outlined at first, later not) as you move from one point to another in the room until you reach the other door. Being a chameleon you can change your colour as you need to with a button press, you can be yellow, red, green and blue, this provides cover as you say stand on a red carpet if you turn red, and yellow on yellow, you can even tip over paint tins and use the colour to cover you there etc.
It is all quite simple and that is a good thing. However there is a lot to the simple stuff, collectables in each level, time limits to be beaten. The replay-ability is clear; there is a lot to do within these levels. There are also seventy levels to do, so you cannot argue with the content here. This is added when you look at the local and global leader boards that are provided as well, you can compare your scores with the very best in the world or just with friends. This adds another interesting competition to proceedings like Rayman Legends did with their challenge mode. The only problem for this is that the loading time can be quite long, sometimes frustrating even.
The music is all very tense and suits the spy theme totally and well done. The graphics are nice and simple, but polished, again suits the game well. It all ties up nicely within a nice package, suiting maybe not all though. The theming is great throughout, up there with any James Bond game, set in a cartoon world right enough!
What I will say is that I enjoyed the game throughout, but there is quite a series of difficulty spikes and at points the game does begin to frustrate at times. The game is very intricate in it detection scheme and unforgiving, while the penalties aren’t so bad because putting you back to the start of the level is not a bad thing as they are so short.
With about six hours of content and a lot more if you are somebody that has to beat everything and collect everything in a game, I would have to say that the four pounds odd price point (even cheaper if you already own another of the developer’s games sometimes) is quite a good deal really. It is an interesting concept and offers something very different to that I have played on the Wii U. I enjoyed my gameplay over all, but it has some points of annoyance but all in all I would have to recommend this game to almost everyone. I would say for people to keep in mind here there are several walls of difficulty and frustration to some levels that may make this off putting for some, but to most people I would give it a solid buy.
REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Nintendo Wii U code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.
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