Title: Chroma Squad
Release date: 2015-04-30
Regular price: 14,99 €
Bundled: Yes
Achievements: Yes
Cards: Yes
Steam user reviews: 95% positive
metacritic: 75/100

Good has triumphed over evil once again!

It was a long journey though. Seriously, I kept reading “about 10-12h” to beat it but I ended up with 20+ hours for a single run
From the time on the right, subtract 2.1h for idling cards and another hour (a bit more perhaps) for pauses and such.
Given that there are 3 different endings I see close to no chance of me going for all the achievements at the moment.

This was an sg win

it also fits this month’s theme! :D

• quick summary

You manage a team of 5 actors who decides to rebel against their director and start their own TV serie. It’s up to you to lead them to success.
It has been (heavily) influenced by the Power Rangers/Super Sentai franchise and I have to admit this was the motive it made me check and then wanting the game =P
Well, game’s good! In fact, I did enjoy it :)

Gamewise, it’s an RPG-ish title with turn-based strategy, with a comic/light tone. They say it’s full of references but I’m pretty sure I missed a lot :\ (As far as I know, Italy is one of the few countries which translate/dub all the foreign movies/shows/series instead of airing them subtitled and their original audio, so this may be the cause of me not getting the references other than not knowing the original source). But, hey, whenever I recognized one, I chuckled :)
Between one fight and another, you’ll have some manage to do to keep your squad successful, basically:
Heroes: You can select which skill set they should use and you can buy/craft them new outfit and weapons;
Studio: Buy/upgrade facilites (equipment?);
Mecha: Upgrade its parts crafting more powerful ones.
The whole crafting system uses materials dropped by defeated monsters (you can also buy packs) that you can combine to create an item (which will have some random bonus added compared to those bought) or merge to obtain an “higher level” material.
You’ll also have to sign contracts with agencies (not sure if it’s mandatory, they obviously give you some kind of boost so I always had a contract active) and answer to emails.

+ A big pro is the team customization. I really like when you can add a personal touch to the game and here you can change names, colors and shouts.

∙ There’s an old-TV-screen-like effect whenever you start the game (and a new episode?) which is rather nice in my opinion but on the long run it sometimes felt a bit annoying.
∙ Audio: played mostly muted. music sounded good but I fear it may become repetitive after a while (don’t know if there are many tracks)
∙ Noticed a significant rise in difficulty toward the end (I think it was during season 4) but it could be due to me not fully understanding game mechanics. Anyhow, this made me wonder if I really want to beat it also at the highest difficulty (needed for 100%)

- Camera: didn’t like how the camera move to keep the “action” centered. It happens during speech-times in fights, camera moves to center on who’s talking. Worst case is when there are a lot of talking characters, all cluttered in a small area and they all have a short sentence to say. You keep pressing Enter to progress and that camera moves only a few pixels away, almost nausea inducting (not really, it’s just to let you understand what kind of uneasiness I felt).
- Stats: every item gives your hero some perks so it’ useful to have some kind of comparison between what they’re already using and what you can buy/craft. Well, this comparison does exist. However it only compares base stats (HP, attack, etc.) you don’t get to see team, audience and other kinds of bonus so you have to constantly move between shop/craft and heroes’ page. A pain. Or you can completely ignore those :\

9/10

Beaten couple of days ago, wanted to do a nice post/review about this ‘cause it’s a worthy game but I was being too lazy. This is what came up after days of jotting down sentences.

September progress