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Neon Chrome

10 tons - @10tonsLtd

written by Ois

Hey, do you remember Crimsonland? Neon Chrome comes from the same devs, and a couple years of experience has done wonders. Neon Chrome is also a top-down Twin-Stick shooter but with with stealth and far more looting.

It is also rather fun. My room got cold and I didn't notice as I was caught up in the game.

In this cyberpunk universe, you are tasked with bringing down the 'Overseer'. By hijacking assets via a control chair you send a cryo'd individuals up various floors. without risking your own body.

Assets have a class, a selection of stat boosts, and defaulted primary and secondary weapon. Your selection options are randomised after each previous asset dies. Some items on the levels require a specific class to activate, such as using hackers to open extra loot crates, while others are simply run & gun grunts.

Every 5 floors you have to battle a boss. This unlocks a floor waypoint so you can start higher up, however starting lower has a reduced amount of floors (three from five), and the chance for early upgrades.

Upgrades come in a few forms.

As you loot and shoot your way up the floors you gain money which can be used to select a primary, secondary, and ability before you start that overrides what the asset has. It can also be used to upgrade your base stats. This is the usual selection of Health, Energy, Damage, Luck, and an extra for upgrade slots. Most of these can be upgraded 100 times, which makes each successive run easier.

There are also per run upgrades that give bonuses to individual gun stats. It's worth putting some points into energy early on as the extra shots gained from the secondary weapon prooved to be life savers.

Cybernetic upgrades are limited by the amount of slots you have. Throughout each run you can find a chamber to install or swap out your loadout. Giving the option to focus on your own stats or abilities your class is lacking in. There's also the rarer chance for 1-time upgrades, such as a large amount of cash or disabling all robotics on the floor.

The game is all procedurally generated, with each floor randomising each time you die. However I have come across a few floors which appear to of been specifically designed. These tend to advance the story and allow the Overseer to waffle on a bit about how you are not going to defeat them.

So far, I've not come across anything that blocks the player or is unfair in the floor layout. I've even gotten the advantage a few times and had the exit or objectives really close to the starting position.

There's a good amount of choices to blast your way through too. While you will mainly use keys to open locked doors or switches to toggle a set on/off you can be a bit more violent. Any wall that wobbles when hit can be shot through, and there's an amount of satisfaction in blasting through one and 1-hit killing the enemy on the other side. Glass and partitions can be smashed through with a melee attack, but are also shattered by enemy weapons. When there's a boss or reinforcements on you, you pretty much end up with a flat open level.

Shoot. Kill. Loot. You'll have to make choices on when to swap out a weapon for a new one depending on what enemies you are encountering, and if it is worth the risk of extra coin Vs. your health to take on bonus rooms and bonus floors.

What surprised me was that you can also be stealthy. You don't see an enemy vision cone, but staying behind them allows you to take them out with a sneak attack. Even if that sneak attack is a plasma shotgun blast at point blank range to their skull!

Unlike the previous game from this dev, I really got into this one.

Graphically it is simple but highly colourful and looking great. The soundtrack is also rather awesome and the voicework of the Overseer does sound like a try-hard badarse you'd love to meet and defeat.

I make no effort to hide the fact I'm terrible at the twin-stick genre. However the pacing here is not as hectic as others and you can turtle or sneak your way through it. Dodging bullets with the geometry rather than the open air of a bullet hell title.

There's a leader board arena multiplayer DLC add on if you like that stuff. For me the main campaign has enough variety to satisfy.

Definitely worth a look.

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