Welcome to our review of Chime Sharp, a game that brings us a mix of Lumines and Tetris, but will it “blend”?
Connect pieces to fill in the level. Your choices make new music with every play. It’s a puzzle, a synthesizer, and a fast game.
Place pieces, paint the board, make music. Chime Sharp is a sequel to 2009’s Chime, a music puzzle game with an addictive, ambient heartbeat. You join shapes to cover a grid, while a beatline reads those shapes as notes. As you cover the board, the music builds to a beautiful crescendo of your own design. The only way to discover Chime is to play it, but if you want a glimpse, consider what it might feel like to cross Tetris, a music sequencer and a hypnotic dream about your favorite pop song.
Having never played the original, I had to rely on online reviews to see what others felt and I was not surprised at all to see 2 remarks appear, it was fun but limited in what was offered. Those were exactly my thoughts on Chime Sharp too. As a sequel, I still think the game is fun but limited.
Chime Sharp is basically a mix of Tetris shapes on a Lumines style game. You got the Tetris shapes and more, not just the originals, but also bigger ones and then there is the timeline of Lumines. All you need to do is make 3 by 3 cubes to get points on the board as well as extend your time so you can keep playing. The more of the playing field you manage to fill up, the higher your score.
Accompanied by truly great music, the resemblances to Lumines’s great soundtrack are obvious as Chime Sharp uses the same style of music. I simply adore music like this, it is by far the best music for games of this genre and I can only applaud this music choice.
Now as this game is time driven, its sole flaw comes to the surface. Once you truly aim for the top, you soon realize that you are more playing for speed and that your actual fun becomes more of a frantic quest for that one free space to place the next shape. It becomes less of a game that incorporated fun but more a desire to just find a spot.
Don’t get me wrong, this game is fun, but there is a breaking point in the system. That one second where you start realizing you are no longer enjoying the game but just try to stay in it. Some may find this the appeal of these games, but personally, I would not mind a more relaxed approach and really just enjoy the puzzling.
A game that came to mind when I made that remark, Loopz, on the original Game Boy. That game was all about the puzzle and not about speed. It just made me want to play Loopz more than Chime Sharp. A little counterintuitive at best. A game should not end up being the reason you pick up another, it should stay in there on its own merit and that was sadly not the case.
In conclusion, as fun as it is at first, it becomes a drag rather than a game you want to keep playing. Give me an endless mode without the timer and I will rate it much higher, the lack of certain options were just too much to give it a high rating, which it should deserve as it does bring together two awesome mechanics, just not properly balanced.
