Color Guardians Review

Color Guardians begins with a colourful world where all the inhabitants appear to be having a very colourful time. Unfortunately all this colour is too much for one monster who arrives and sucks most of the colour away leaving a very grey landscape. Obviously the inhabitants are not happy with the recent transformation and want to the world back to its former cutesy and colourful look.

Color Guardians is a side scrolling running game where you can play as three different characters (who all play the same). The idea is you start a level from the left and have to run & jump your way to the end i.e. the right, it’s a very linear process. As you run through you have to try to collect various coloured orbs and pass obstacles that block your way. Most levels tend to have three lanes which allow you to move up and down to collect the orbs or bypass an obstacle. Colour is the name of the game and in Color Guardians that’s what you need to collect. Orbs are either blue, red or green, you can change the colour of your character to match the orb colour which in turn allows you to collect them, you also need to change colours to take advantage of trampolines and dodging obstacles.

As you may have noticed there is very little to play with in Color Guardians, the idea is simple enough, run forward collecting orbs until you reach the end. The graphics appear to cater for a younger audience but you’ll soon realise that Color Guardians is not an easy game, it can become a very fast paced and frantically challenging experience.

The levels gradually increase in difficulty as you progress, more obstacles appear, more colour changes are required and all at a faster pace. This undoubtedly drives the perfectionist in you as you try to collect all the orbs and luckily there are several checkpoints within a level because you will fail a lot. However because Color Guardians is so simplistic in design you will feel a lack of drive the longer you play because there’s nothing else to do besides running forward and moving up and down. Beating the levels is a simple case of memorising the levels, which is frustrating because it takes away from the gameplay.

Graphically Color Guardians is very colourful, the colours are very bright and in your face but there’s nothing here you wouldn’t have seen bettered in other titles. The characters are cute but lack charisma, the backgrounds are pretty average, the orbs are colourful but nothing to get excited about whilst the obstacles lack imagination.

There are themed stages that include a factory and a cave but they all play exactly the same. The bosses seem to be a bit of afterthought, in fact the bosses portion of Color Guardians are probably the easiest stages to play. Musically Color Guardians is charmingly cute with catchy themes that fit in with the general ambience.

Color Guardians is an easy pick up and play title which can become addictive in a ‘beating your high score’ but there’s simply not enough going on for you to go back to it once you complete it and that’s even if you decide to spend the time to finish it. There’s hardly any variety & whilst the colours are bold and right Color Guardians just lacks a certain degree of polish. If you want to kill an hour with a game you don’t have to think about then Color Guardians may satisfy your urges the once but it just lacks that replay value that a game like this requires.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 4 code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.