If you found this review because you’re colorblind and like video games, then you’re in luck because Colour Bind can be played by color blind gamers. It’s also a fun game for people who can see colors, and like physics puzzlers. If you fall into either of those categories, read on. If you can see colors but don’t care for physics/ puzzle games, then… I dunno, I hear Max Payne 3 is pretty good. Everyone else, keep reading.
Physics puzzlers are all the rage with the cool nerds these days. Alter gravity, slow down time, push and throw stuff, all so that you can make your way through one baffling brain-twister after the other. It’s a great genre for masochistic smarty-pantses to play and it’s an excellent way for indie developers to show off new ideas for game mechanics.
Colour Bind is a gravity-based puzzler with a couple of neat twists. First, players control a rolling vehicle rather than a humanoid character. Secondly, objects of different color respond differently to gravity.
The little car rolls around 2 dimensional levels filled with ramps and platforms, and players have to find the right way to reach the exit, without getting stuck in pits, or blocked by doors. The car’s wheels can rapidly inflate, allowing it to jump, and it can push objects or buttons to activate doors or other features.
While that makes for a fine puzzle game, Colour Bind adds in another layer by making objects of different colors fall in different directions. A green block might fall up in one level, while blue things on the same level fall sideways, and the car itself will fall downwards.
Knocking things off platforms so they’ll fall to the right spot and hit a button is often a tactic to reach the end of a level. However Colour Bind also lets players change the color of objects (And their car) on some levels, or alter the direction that a particular color falls. As the game progresses through the 50 levels, it continues throwing in new concepts such as these, and more.
Push a block so that it falls up to hit a button on the ceiling, or perhaps change the color of the car itself so that it will plummet sideways to the exit, maybe even set up a chain reaction that will send objects flying in all directions at once. This is the sort of play that emerges from being able to screw around with the force of gravity!
At first these levels only take a minute to figure out, but the difficulty ramps up, and the puzzles start to get devilishly clever. It doesn’t just rely on mental prowess either; some of the levels require quick reflexes to execute the proper move at the right time. With a bouncy car zooming around the maps, and gravity fluctuating, Colour Bind is often an equal challenge for head and hands.
Puzzle fans will certainly enjoy it, but the less hard-core might end up loosing steam after an hour or so of play. Even if players stick around for the full game, the single-player experience will only take about four or five hours to complete. There’s a bit of incentive to replay though, as some of the puzzles can be solved in more than one way, and achievements are earned for doing them the hard way.
However, there is a cooperative mode which features an entirely new set of puzzles that require both players to work together in order to get on of their vehicles to the exit. Alas, this is only for local coop, so it requires a friend in the same room to play (Or one person with some serious hand-eye coordination).
Despite the local-only limitation, the co-op mode is still a lot of fun and will extend the game’s lifespan by an additional 20 levels for players who can endure the company of other people. Another feature to expand the game is a level editor that lets players make and share levels online.
For gamers who are color blind, there is an option to augment the colors with different patterns, so that players can still distinguish between them even in grayscale.
Colour Bind is a simple game, and a bit on the short side. It also has an appeal focused firmly on fans of the physics/puzzle sub-genre. Yet, it does an excellent job in giving that segment of gamers what they want. It’s out for PC now.
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