Spy Chameleon review for Xbox One

The growing Xbox One indie library has something new for the casual gamer, Spy Chameleon. Unfinished Pixel’s new digital release is a quick stage by stage stealth game that focuses more on speed than stealth.

In Spy Chameleon, players take control of a chameleon thief, and players progress through the game on a stage by stage basis. All stages have the same goal, get to the exit without being caught. This can be accomplished by changing colors and blending into the background when a camera or sentry is looking at you. As most players know, each lettered button; a, b, x and y on your Xbox One controller corresponds to one of four colors; red, yellow, green and blue. Players will press one of the colored buttons to change the chameleon to that color to blend into the background to avoid detection.

Each stage in Spy Chameleon has bonus objectives, for those of you obsessed with getting everything in the game. There are flies and ladybugs in each room to collect and they give players an idea of what the fastest path through a room might be. Of course one of the three optional objectives is to collect all the flies in the room, and the second is to finish the room in under a certain amount of time. Many of the beginning rooms are very simple so it?s pretty easy to finish these objectives early on. However, as you may expect, later on it gets much harder. The third objective is to collect ladybugs in each room which do not show up until you have finished the room at least once.

For the most part Spy Chameleon is really a casual game for those who want to pick up the controller and play a couple of stages at a time. The early on levels are a great setup for some of the later stages where players will have to memorize where the colors are on the controller pretty fast or they will get caught. Two main items in the game really BUG me though. First, there is no on screen guide for the button colors; This means that there is not an easy way for players to know what button changes their chameleon to which color, unless the colors are memorized ahead of time. Second, the ladybugs do not appear in the stages until a room is completed. So even on the really easy stages, if you are a completionist, the stages will need to be played three times to get all of the objectives.

Outside of the two minor caveats, Spy Chameleon is easy to pick up and play and is great for the casual Xbox One gamer, or someone who has ten or fifteen minutes to kill at a time.