Chime Sharp (PlayStation 4) Review

Chime Sharp, while being a Tetris style game, is only one in the most basic sense. The game has you placing various shaped blocks on a playing field. The field is a grid, and every time a quad shape is created on the field, you change the colour. There is a time limit, and players are required to change the colour of as much of the board as possible before time runs out.

As progress is made through each of the tracks, the boards change and new shapes are received. Each of the boards comes with its own degree of challenge. One grid will be missing large sections of the grid, while one is missing just the middle of the board. With the insane amount of shapes at one's disposal, there are plenty of variations to use to make quads around the board.

There's the added benefit of each song, thumping away as you work, and fortunately most of the tracks are really intense. Even the slower ones are so easy to get lost in that it's just as easy to lose yourself in the task at hand. This might sound amazing, but it's a bit of a double-edged sword. Chime Sharp isn't interested in forcing its hand, and because of that, it's not immediately obvious what the goal is.

Unlocking new tracks and modes requires getting a fairly high amount of the board cleared. These modes change the way the game is played, but unlocking them require a very high level of skill. This is a bit obnoxious, as some of the boards are much easier to unlock other modes on than others. The difficulty will, of course, be relative from person to person; however, the levels don't follow a good difficulty curve from time to time.

Fortunately, for those tenacious enough to follow through, the other modes are very interesting. They are varied, and add a lot of replayability to the game. Even without the other modes, there are plenty of tracks to get lost in. There's clearly a lot to do within the confines of Chime Sharp, so even if you hit a brick wall with one track, there's plenty to do outside of it.

Chime Sharp is a great casual game that manages to be fairly difficult to master. However, it doesn't ever feel cheap, instead providing all the tools needed, and then asking players to succeed within their own imagination. It's uncommon for puzzle games to offer up this degree of freedom, and Chime Sharp is all the more powerful for it.