The Harmonix representative began his spiel. "Okay, so the game is a..."
"A first-person shooter!" I joked, naming the single game genre that the maker of Rock Band would be least likely to attempt.
"...It is a first-person shooter," he replied.
Yes, as it turns out, Harmonix is working on a free-to-play, musical first-person shooter called Chroma. It's a team-based multiplayer game in the vein of Team Fortress, except it's more like Fortress! The Musical, since to play it you'll have to be as good with music as you are with machine guns.
Harmonix is developing Chroma in cooperation with Hidden Path, the developer of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It will conduct a closed alpha test of the game later this month, with an eye towards rolling out the beta and the final version of the game by this fall.
So, how's this all work? Well, everything that happens is all on the beat of the music that plays in each level. The firing of guns, the explosion of grenades, everything happens on the beat and everything has sound effects that complement the audio track. One of the primary features of each level are transport pads that also operate musically – stand on one and it'll blast you over to the next transport pad, then the next, then the next, and the travel time between each one is exactly on the beat, so you have to tap, tap, tap rhythmically to quickly move yourself around the level.
The other musical wrinkle in the version I played earlier this month was this: At certain times during the song, the level will morph, adding and subtracting geographical and architectural features. So, Harmonix said, a sniper tower may appear out of nowhere at a certain point, and snipers (and everyone else) will learn to anticipate these moments during the song and get into place.
Harmonix showed two different types of levels, both common to the shooter genre – a control-the-points level in which teams attempt to keep possession of different beacons around the map, and a "cart push" level where both teams shoot at an object to attempt to get it into their side's goal.
You Gotta Have Class
How music affects each match is mostly determined, however, by the class of character you choose to play.
I began with the Assault class, which Harmonix says is meant for those players who are more into shooters than rhythm games. You can just hold down the fire button to spray out bullets on the beat, or throw grenades that explode on the beat. This was in fact not that difficult (although I spent most of my time just bouncing around between those transport pads, because man, that was fun). But I wanted to try to up the difficulty, so I switched characters.
The Engineer, which I tried next, is the character you might have been imagining when I told you Harmonix was combining shooting and music. A two-lane beat-matching pattern straight out of Rock Band appears in the middle of the screen, and you can only fire your gun by tapping the triggers (or mouse buttons) along with the pattern.
The pattern is a simple repeating loop, so you can memorize it rather than having to watch it the entire time. And this is a good thing, because it turns out that even if you are decent at shooters and music games, playing them both at the same time – tapping out a rhythmic pattern while attempting to aim your sights on enemies – is like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. Trying to do one makes you forget to do the other. To help this, the Engineer has a very strong auto-aim, so you merely need to get your cursor sort of near enemies to get the shots to land.
I failed hard at this. Real hard. So I moved on to the Sneak character. This sprightly teammate can quickly get into position to snipe the opposing team, but of course it's more complicated than that. When you pull up your scope, a meter rapidly begins to fill up from 0 to 100 percent. If you fire your bullet right at the 100 percent mark – which not coincidentally is right on the beat – you'll get a one-hit kill, every time. This is harder than it sounds. Actually, even with enemies pretty much standing still I had trouble nailing it perfectly. Now imagine they're, say, not just standing there like idiots.
So I moved on, thinking maybe I'd find another class that I was just naturally good at. I tried the Support class, which is basically a Team Fortress Medic as far as I know, which is not too far. You can project a healing beam onto your teammates. To heal them. I didn't pick up on any particular musical feature.
Finally, where there is a Medic there will always be a Tank, a ginormous dude who fires ginormouser bullets. After you get a lock on a target, you can launch a rocket into the air in any direction, then tap on the beat to constantly redirect the rocket towards the target – a "beat-seeking missile," as Harmonix put it.
Chroma, which will be available on the PC through Steam, is free to play, but Harmonix is against the idea of "pay to win." So it seems like the monetization strategy here will be getting players to buy upgrades that are more cosmetic than power-boosting – different skins for the characters, e.g., but perhaps more importantly different music and sounds. You might be able to buy custom noises for your weapons and custom tracks for the levels, and as your team begins to dominate your music may drown out the enemy's.
Can fans of music games and shooters learn to put aside their differences? Does the Venn diagram of people who care about both genres overlap enough? Hey, at least it'll be free, so there's nothing lost in giving Chroma a spin this fall.
