Be Excellent To Each Other

Chroma: Harmonix’s Musical First-Person Shooter

Imagine jumping into a match in your favorite first-person shooter. You’ve finally perfected your loadout, you have your best gun equipped, and your reflexes are sharp. The other team is going down.

Now imagine that with each shot, you’re keeping time with the beat of a song playing in the background. Imagine that you’re waiting for a change-up in that song to transform the terrain around you, and that the only way to quickly chase your opponent across the map is to perfectly time your movement to the rhythm. This is the brilliant madness of Harmonix’s Chroma.

Chroma is a musical first person-shooter Harmonix is co-developing with Hidden Path Entertainment, makers of Counter Strike: GO and Defense Grid. Chroma has all the trappings of any other FPS -- multiple classes, a primary and secondary weapon, score and time-based challenges -- but combines its warfare with beat-matching and rhythm requirements you’d normally expect from Rock Band.

In each match, a song begins playing as soon as you step foot on the map. This song is the foundation for everything you’ll do in Chroma. If you don’t pay attention to the beat, you’ll be missing out on movement and damage bonuses, and, depending on your class, you may not even be able to use your weapon at all.

Chroma’s classes range from traditional shooter-style mechanics to hardcore rhythm gameplay. The Assault class is the closest thing Chroma has to a “standard” shooter, armed with a submachine gun that lets you spray and pray with as little regard for the soundtrack as Chroma will allow. His secondary weapon is a grenade launcher that can be fired at any time, but the grenade will only explode on the downbeat of the map’s music.

Far on the other end of the spectrum is the Engineer, who absolutely requires that you understand rhythm. His primary weapon is a pair of pistols, and as soon as they’re equipped, two familiar Rock Band-style note lanes appear on screen. Using the left and right triggers on a controller (or left and right mouse buttons on a PC), you’ll need to match the beat to the notes on screen, though thankfully you’ll be locked on to your target while doing so. The Engineer’s secondary weapon is a shotgun that also requires you to match the beat, but without the advantage of being locked on. Harmonix notes that while playing as the Engineer, the patterns in the note lane repeat, so once you’ve learned the arrangement you’ll be able to pay more attention to the battlefield than the falling notes.

The other classes in Chroma offer interesting shades of grey between pure shooter and pure rhythm. The Sneak class moves quickly and has a sniper rifle that can be fired at any time, but offers a one-hit kill if you fire exactly on the beat. Her secondary weapon is a pistol that offers a damage multiplier each time you’re able to consecutively fire on the beat, which can eventually build up to devastating effect.

The Support class has a healing beam as her primary weapon, which makes her an asset to teammates. Beyond healing, she can also offer a shield to increase other players’ damage resistance, and she’s able to fire at any time regardless of the beat. Her secondary weapon is a low-powered rifle that doesn’t do much damage, but at least saves her from being completely defenseless.

Finally, the Tank is by far the slowest-moving class, but has a brutal rocket launcher that can do massive damage. It can be fired at any time, but if you tap the fire button to the beat after shooting, the projectile will become a homing rocket that seeks out targets -- or, as Harmonix’s John Drake joked, a “beat-seeking missile.” The Tank’s secondary weapon is a shotgun that can only be fired on half notes.

Each class plays music as they fire, and you can customize your loadout for each class to pick the type of music you like best. Even if two players are using the same class, one might choose a fast-paced rock sound while another chooses something more electronic. Harmonix hopes that putting a team of multiple classes together will feel more like putting a band together, and all sounds are designed to be complementary, even if they’re different styles. In other words, you don’t have to worry about everything sounding like a mess.

Beyond influencing the classes, the background beat can also determine how you move on the map. Each character can dash, but that dash will last longer if you initiate it on the downbeat. Throughout the match, you’ll also find connected fast-travel stations that let you zip across a map one-by-one, but you can only connect to the next station in line by hitting the button on the downbeat. For a slow-moving class like the Tank, being able to use these stations is essential if you want to stay competitive.

Finally, each song also has a “change-up” at set intervals, which not only affects the song itself, but transforms the map around you. Throughout a map, you’ll see outlines of bridges or sniper towers or unreachable platforms. These areas only fill in and become accessible with each successive change-up, and can completely change a match’s momentum if one team is suddenly able to capture the higher ground.

In Chroma’s current, pre-alpha build -- which you can sign up to try out yourself -- two modes are playable. The first involves teams trying to try to take control of “Signals” in the middle of a map to gain points and take control of the level. The second is a “Cart Push” tug-of-war map that has teams shooting at a cart to move it along a track toward their base. Whoever gets the cart to their base wins.

Chroma will be free-to-play, with additional maps, music, and modes available for purchase. Harmonix’s goal is to never sell anything that gives players a competitive advantage to avoid any kind of “pay to win” scenario. For now, there are no plans for licensed music or to sell additional classes, but the game is still very early in development, so those plans could still change.

There will surely be much more to learn about Chroma in the months ahead, but you can sign up for the closed alpha right now, which is planned to launch before the end of February. There will also be a public beta later this year. Chroma has only been confirmed for PC so far, but consoles haven't necessarily been ruled out for the future. Right now, the plan is to launch Chroma this fall, but Harmonix is very open about those plans being fluid since, again, development still has a long way to go.