Marvin Spectrum

It'll make your brain hurt

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Marvin Spectrum is somewhat of an action/puzzle game mix that will have you tapping your keyboard in frustration, as you try to keep up with the pace and complexity.

In Marvin Spectrum, you guide your character through gates. There are three types of gates- those that you duck under, those you hop over, and those you dive through. The catch is that the gates are also colored, and you have to press a-f on your keyboard to change your character’s color. In the first level you don’t have to worry about changing colors at all, but by the fourth you’ll be switching between blue, green, red, and purple. I’m not sure if this is one of those concepts that affects ‘both’ sides of your brain or not, but it sure felt like it. Even if you tell yourself which fingers are on which keys you’ll still freeze up when the gates start coming faster. There are four levels in all, with a new color introduced in each one. You can also play unlimited mode, where it only takes one miss to die and all four colors are used from the start.

Graphics have a nice hand-drawn style to them, a little rough but still cartoony enough to fit the game. Same for the animations. The music is upbeat and fits the game well, with the option to adjust audio volume. In the options menu you can also choose different hats to wear (unlocked by doing well in the game) which is a nice touch.

It should be noted that there are two versions of this game, regular and turbo. I found regular challenging enough, with turbo getting a little too hard for the multi-color levels. In the very least the turbo version should have the option to return to normal mode, but it doesn’t. The game is good, but there’s not enough ways to play it in my opinion. The levels are over pretty quick- personally I found using four colors a bit hard, but I had a lot of fun only using two colors at the end of levels 1 and 2, but with fast gates. Some sort of custom mode where you could define what colors are used would have been cool. Still though, the game is fun. It’s an incredibly simply concept turned into something different and challenging, and for that I give it credit.

Click here to play Marvin Spectrum






Comments (0) [view all]
Click here to leave a comment