Chameneon [Xbox]

Burning Goat Studio’s Chameneon is simple in its execution, but does so in a way that makes it fiendishly moreish to keep on playing. You play as a little electrifying chameleon who must save cyberspace from a devastating virus by gliding across wires to collect electric charges to boost your battery, as well as collectible floppy disks.

With four worlds, each with twenty levels within, it does provide a quickly increasing level of challenge. You’ll zip along wires, with a gravity-style element holding you to it, and this makes timing things crucial, as jumping to reach other wires will sometimes lead to you drifting off into the ether. As you progress you’ll move on from just having electric bursts to jump over, to having to switch between multiple neon lines, slowing down to perfect jumps, speeding up to clear great distances and avoiding enemies, too.

Completing a level isn’t purely about collecting every single one of the electric charges available (although the completionist in me still aims for that), as long as you collect enough of them to register as 100% charged in the top left corner, then that will do. Hell, you can even complete a level with less than 100%, however this will be recorded and shown within the main menu - which is always useful if you just want to move on and come back and retry later. Thankfully, any already collected items in a level, whether lightning bolts or floppy disks, will remain collected (showing as a silhouette instead) upon retrying, so that only the ones you’ve missed will show fully.

Visually, levels in Chameneon have a distinct look, with the line standing out in the foreground - with different coloured wires being able to be switched between, and highlighted when active - and a galaxy-like cyberspace grid in the background. Having a little bit more variety in the designs would have been nice, but for such a budget price it’s hard to complain. The soundtrack is super catchy, though it seems to just be one long, looping track per world - so after a while it’ll get a bit repetitive, before you move onto the next world and it gets enjoyable again.

There’s also Time Challenges for each level for if you’re looking to up the ante even further - though these can feel extremely frustrating due to their difficulty. The game doesn’t really advertise these times, but checking the achievement list will give you the details. Unlike most other budget titles, this is not one for the achievement hunters that are looking for a quick 1000G - there’s a total of 82 achievements here, with 80 of them being for succeeding at the time trials for each and every level, which it’s safe to say will take you a while.

Overall, Chameneon is a fantastic little budget title coming in at just £3.29 on Xbox. It offers a fun but challenging gameplay progression, whilst retaining a simple-enough premise, making it great for fans of auto-runner titles that are looking for a bit of a challenge - and the fairly bite-sized levels make it easy to pick up and put down whenever you want. Moving on to further levels even without collecting everything in prior ones saves it from locking you out indefinitely if you get stuck. The low price point means it isn’t too much of a risk, but will still give you a decent bit of playtime, which is great value for money in my book.

In the end, we decided to give Chameneon the Collecting Asylum rating of 7.5/10.

Are you interested in Chameneon? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to QUByte for the Chameneon Xbox review code!