Harmonix Leaves Their Comfort Zone (Sorta)

When gamers hear of Harmonix Music Systems, they instantly think of either dancing like a goof to Lady Gaga in front of their kinect, or being JUST buzzed enough to think they can sink “Creep” by Radiohead. However, with their new game, Rock Band and Dance Central developer Harmonix hopes to add a new association to mind: COMBAT! The recently announced Chroma may just deliver on an experience unlike any other. The first-person-shooter is planned to be a free-to-play game released over Steam later this year. Which, in case you haven’t noticed, is practically the antithesis to Harmonix’s usual MO, and that’s why it may just be the coolest damn thing ever created, especially with some of the things they’ve been saying about it.

"We’re still prototyping and concepting out a lot of gameplay, but our goal is to make it so that the gameplay and the music are fundamentally linked to one another in meaningful ways. One example is our rhythmic traversal pad system – there will be traversal pads placed around a map and players can bounce between them, on the beat of the music, to quickly move from place to place."

The game so far seems to be promising a plethora of exciting new ways to experience music as a means of combat. These include using your own ability to keep the beat to give yourself speed or damage bonuses, or even using weapons tied to the music! One of these is a pair of dual-wielding pistols for the Engineer class, which is utilized by following a beatmatch pattern connected to the music currently playing. While strange concepts like this and the dynamic battlefields (also musically influenced and affected) may seem daunting, there are indeed a number of your FPS standards to make sure that the experience is still based in some kind of logical, normal gameplay formula. However, with all this new being built off the old ideas, Chroma may just be one of those shooters that really can be a “CoD Killer”. Don’t believe me? Then maybe this announcement trailer will interest you.