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I underestimated Color Guardians. It lured me in with its wholesome atmosphere. The characters’ wide smiles looked warm and inviting. But once I started playing, I found a devilish platformer that required a lot of patience and skill.
Out on May 12 for PlayStation 4 (reviewed), PlayStation Vita, PC, and Mac, Color Guardians depicts a land devoid of color thanks to a gluttonous villain named Krogma. The playable guardians — Rad, Lia, and Grock — must fill in the black-and-white shades left behind by collecting paint orbs. Made by Costa Rican developer Fair Play Labs, Color Guardians also could have ended up on Nintendo’s consoles were it not for Sony’s generous support (find out more in our interview with the devs here).
Interestingly, Color Guardians borrows a few elements from famous platformers that are important to both companies’ legacies. The way the characters spin around to collect orbs is very reminiscent of Crash Bandicoot, PlayStation’s famous spin-happy mascot from the ‘90s. The world map is a clear homage to Super Mario Bros.: Characters move from one level to the next in diverse, whimsical environments. The first area even has a scene that ends with a funny (if overused) joke about rescuing princesses.
But Color Guardians doesn’t dwell on the past. It shapes its own unique identity through crafty challenges and color-matching gameplay that’ll either delight or frustrate you.
Above: Who cleans up all the mess the guardians leave behind?
What you’ll like
It puts your Guitar Hero and Rock Band skills to good use
Color Guardians isn’t a rhythm game, but it’ll feel familiar if you’ve ever played Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Instead of having notes fall down the screen, it has orbs spread out across three horizontal lanes. The characters are always running, and they can only collect the orbs the same color as them. The controller’s Triangle button turns you yellow, Square is for red, and X makes you blue.
Simply running over the orbs is enough to get them. But if you want to increase your score, you have to spin as soon as you touch them using the color-changing buttons.
Timing my changes was a lot like trying to match the beat in a song. Sometimes I mashed buttons really fast to spin through a series of the same orbs or rapidly switched colors if different colored orbs were in the lane. The gameplay requires intense hand-eye coordination. I had to pay attention to what was in front of me and also look further down to prepare for future transformations.
Once I got used to it, I fell into a color-matching groove. It’s the same trance-like state I get into when I’m doing really good with the guitar or drums in Rock Band. I’m so focused on all the orbs coming at me that I can’t worry about anything else but the game.
Above: The Mario-inspired world map.
Escalating challenges
After the tutorial, the difficulty ramps up with the addition of tricky obstacles that test your reflexes. For example, you’ll come across plants that block access to all three lanes. The only way to open them is, like everything else, to match their colors. Color Guardians likes to throw a mixture of blue, red, and yellow plants in a row with multicolored orbs in-between them. You have to change colors to open the first plant, change again to grab the orbs, and then transform a third time (or more) to clear the other plants.
From there, the developer stacks more obstacles next to each other. It didn’t take long to go from plowing through plants to using mushrooms as jump pads and hopping on railroad carts to ride on train tracks — sometimes all in the same level. In later areas, knowing when to not switch colors (like when colored mushrooms toss you into a wave of enemies) becomes a valuable skill.
The seemingly endless amount of new obstacles is a bit overwhelming, but it keeps the game from being too repetitive or boring.
A lighthearted adventure
True to its name, Color Guardians’ scenery is, well, colorful. Running through the blue and purple hues of the Crystal Caves or the lush greenery in Mountain Heights’ forests made me feel like I was inside a fairy tale. Despite the demon spawn invading their world, the characters are almost always smiling. Even the way they die is cute: Rad and his friends splatter into small puddles after slamming into a wall or getting squashed.
Fair Play Labs extends that experience to the PS4 controller. The light bar changes depending on what color you character is, and you can hear sound effects through the tiny speaker, like the blaring music that signals the start of a level or the grunts the characters make before they die.
Above: The vines don’t stretch out till the last second, so it’s easy to miss them.
What you won’t like
Difficulty can also feel cheap
Color Guardians occasionally crosses the line between what feels fair and what feels cheap. A few of the levels toward the end of the game are full of so many orbs, enemies, and other obstacles that it’s hard to tell what’s going on. And it’s frustrating when obstacles in different lanes line up so perfectly that they hide each other.
Some areas even have semi-transparent pillars in the foreground that block your view of incoming threats (see the gallery below). How am I supposed to avoid something I can’t see?
The guardians are indistinguishable
Though Color Guardians pays its respects to platforming royalty, it doesn’t do a great job of bringing its own characters to life. Cute as they are, they have little personality. In cutscenes, Rad, Grock, and Lia look stiff, and their dialogue is just there to move the story forward. If it weren’t for the shapes of their heads, I would’ve had a hard time telling them apart. They also have the same abilities, so the only reason to switch between them is if you want to look at someone else for a change.
Above: Levels get pretty complicated.
Conclusion
As I died over and over, I couldn’t help but think, “Am I too old for this?” I thought my reflexes were too slow to keep up with the pace of the game. But I kept pushing because of how satisfying it was to overcome each new challenge. When Color Guardians is playing fair (which it is most of the time), it’s a frenetic platformer that rewards your patience and studious observations.
It doesn’t have the characters or the personality to become an instant classic like its inspirations, but it’s a fun diversion that’s worth having on your digital shelf.
Score: 79/100
Color Guardians is out now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, PC, and Mac. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a download code for the purpose of this review.
