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• gamedeal user

  May 29, 2015

  Step aside, DNF, we may have a new record for longest delayed game sequel. So for anyone who's not an old fart like me who actually played Chip's Challenge 1 back in the day of hamster-powered processors, when sound cards were just being adopted and Voodoo cards were an upper class luxury, it was pretty much one of the de facto standards for puzzle games of the day. You've got block pushing puzzles, switch-toggling puzzles, enemies and hazards to avoid, ice tiles that you can't control yourself on, and some interesting interactions between tiles such as dirt blocks defusing bombs or making bridges across water. These are all strung together in increasingly sadistic ways to make levels with some legitimately puzzling elements, and a LOT of trial-and-error. Chip's Challenge 2 picks up pretty much where we left off, with 200-ish new puzzles (all designed in the 90's) and a few tutorial levels explaining old and new mechanics; enemies can eat blue keys, green keys are good for multiple uses, and a brand new dick move: bombs that need to be turned into chips to be collected. Where the game *could* have benefited greatly from the massively increased average desktop resolution these days, it has instead opted for retro authenticity (or perhaps engine limitations) to keep its tiny visible area of the playing field, enabling a lot of "fuck you" moments that you could not possibly see coming the first time. To its credit, there is now a level select function rather than all those awful passwords. It commits an unfortunate number of what are now considered cardinal sins of the puzzle genre (including a number of awful action-based levels), there's as much butt hole puzzle design as legitimate puzzle design (new pieces like the randomized teleport were literally invented purely to frustrate you), and its best shot at success is riding on the coattails of 25-year old nostalgia, but for being $5 and coming with a level editor and the first game, I think it gets a pass.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 2, 2015

  Full video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udggMQ-mc-c TL;DR It’s worth giving Chip’s Challenge 2 a play. Just go into it expecting a game from over twenty years ago, and the trappings (or lack thereof) that come with such a thing. Well here’s something I never thought I’d be reviewing. Chip’s Challenge 2, the official sequel to Chip’s Challenge! The original was first released for the Atari Lynx in 1989, but eventually saw increased popularity due to its inclusion in the Microsoft Windows Entertainment Pack in 1992. If you’d like to know more about that one then I’ve got a full review video covering it, so let’s move right along. Chuck Sommerville, the developer of Chip’s Challenge, had pretty much finished developing this sequel back in 1991. But there was a problem: the publisher, Epyx, had gone bankrupt. Many of their assets were sold to a Christian media group, Bridgestone Multimedia, and they not interested in bringing the game to market. Sommerville tried to release it on his own, but Bridgestone would only continue to negotiate if he handed over a large undisclosed sum of cash upfront. He was never able to afford this, further attempts to renegotiate the rights went ignored for years, and the game was forgotten. In fact, Sommerville said “I generally thought the only way Chip’s Challenge 2 was ever going to see the light of day was by having my wife leak it on the internet on my death.” In the meantime, he developed and released Chuck’s Challenge, which I also reviewed in the past, but it was more of a stand-in for Chip’s Challenge 2 rather than a true sequel. Finally, in April of 2015 it was announced that the rights to Chip’s Challenge had been granted to his company, Niffler Limited. Has it been worth the decades-long wait? Well, yes and no, as that depends on how hardcore a Chip’s Challenge fan you are. Personally I was psyched to finally be able to play this thing that was long considered vaporware, if only for the curiosity factor. But as with so many things that languish for such a long time, it’s normal to be a bit disappointed in the result. Chip’s Challenge 2 is a game that acts like it just emerged from a 25 year coma, not stopping to consider what decade it’s in. As a result, it looks and plays just like a game from 1991, complete with MIDI-quality music and low-res graphics that can’t even be scaled up to modern resolutions. Now, I think that I prefer it this way myself, in the sense that in such an unusual case I want the original artistic intent to be preserved. But being that it’s released on Steam in 2015 with a price tag putting it in the territory of far beefier games, it’s not going to be an easy sell to everyone. That said, it really is a proper, enjoyably tricky sequel to the game from 1989, and if you still enjoy Chip’s Challenge, it’s well worth checking out. For starters, the look and feel of the game is highly familiar, falling somewhere between the Atari Lynx game and the Windows 3.1 game in terms of aesthetics. I can easily see this being exactly how Mr Sommerville originally envisioned the game back in ‘91, and it’s just cool to be able to see this finally step out of the shadows. But it’s a bit of a let-down that it’s such a barebones program, with only the most basic of options, and certainly nothing like the ability to play at a scaled-up widescreen resolution. The game window is restricted to the same play area as it was originally, which is fine I suppose, but it would be nice to have the option for some art around the edges instead of just black space, or at least to be able to play it full-screen. And even though it’s a Steam game, you can’t use the Steam overlay, and achievements are an old-school pop-up dialog window straight out of Windows 95. Okay, actually I kinda dig that, so whatever. The graphics tiles and design of the levels are all awesome though, and there are 79 additional features to play with, consisting of new game elements, abilities, and monsters. In some levels you can even play as Chip’s companion from the first game, Melinda the Mental Marvel. She not only looks different, but can access certain areas Chip cannot, and has different strengths and weaknesses. But even with all the new textures and logic, the basic gameplay remains. It’s a top-down, tile-based logic puzzle game, with a timer and a goal for each level. There are a number of chips to collect, which are often in plain sight, but grabbing them quickly enough is another story. Two hundred of these levels await you this time, created by a number of talented designers, but the goal is always to reach the swirly exit tile by way of logical object manipulation. The new items, tiles, and enemies make for some absolute mind-benders, with things like dynamite, railroad tracks, electric wires, logic gates, and bandits. But again, it really is just more Chip’s Challenge with very little in the way of evolution. If anything, it feels more like an expansion pack, and there’s nothing wrong with that I guess. It’s just that I feel it could have also done a bit more to appeal to gamers of 2015, instead of just those of us from the early 90’s who never got their fix. Things like the inclusion of puzzles that are totally action-based, or are nothing more than sadistic mazes, are incredibly grating, same as they were in the first one. The aggravation these incite could have been avoided: for instance, Chuck’s Challenge 3D included a rewind feature that made playing with game logic a breeze, but no such feature is on offer here. Again, I can understand keeping the original game’s integrity intact, but I also would just like to enjoy this with some new, optional features to get past the parts that didn’t age as well. It does let you skip levels at will, but sometimes I’d rather just retry from a certain part than punk out on the entire thing. Oh well, it is what it is, and what it is is a game for a niche audience of Chip’s Challenge fans and retro puzzle gamers. The fact that it is now purchasable at all is a serious accomplishment, and I’m seriously happy to see it. I’m not so happy about the barebones nature of it, being a 2015 release and all, but I can also excuse it in a special case like this. I’m also not happy about the level editor being an extra piece of DLC, ugh, I could have done without THAT bit of modern gaming business practice. But if you get it alongside the original game on Steam, you get everything for five bucks at the moment, so it’s not a big deal. If you’ve been curious about the sequel, or have never even tried the original, it’s worth giving Chip’s Challenge 2 a look. But just go into it expecting a game from over twenty years ago, and the trappings, or lack thereof, that come with such a thing.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 22, 2019

  Oh boy... this was a SEVERE letdown. I've owned this game for a long time. 2nd game I ever bought on Steam. I returned to it again recently, and it still sucked. This is one of those games you want to love, but just can't. Level design is not nearly as interesting a CC1, and a lot of the late game levels are an extreme difficulty spike that replicate the worst parts of the first game. Not to mention in my game there's 3 of the same level. 197, 198, and 199 are all "Gears", a level I don't even think is in the main game. I am using the proper level pack, and have no idea what is wrong. Not to mention around 90% of the levels are all marked wrong or have that same issue. The entire game seems like an insult to the legacy of CC1 from my experiences. Do yourself a favor and buy CC1 instead. It does more right than this one does.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 10, 2023

  i really love what this game is trying to do-- it's a great "long-awaited sequel"-- but a LOT of the levels feel purposefully time-wastey or simply don't make sense on a difficulty scale when compared to the levels surrounding it. lots of really cool stuff (the logic gate elements are awesome) to work with puzzle-wise, but for some reason a ton of levels feel like amateur Mario Maker creations, full of enemy spam, haphazard design, and easy-to-make mistakes that set you all the way back to the start. on top of that, the game comes with basically no options, which would be fine personally, but the audio mixing is SO BAD. there are SFX that are louder than the sun exploding, all while the music plays on a MIDI piano heard from a house down the road or something. Lack of proper keybinds/shortcuts for the level editor is also frustrating; there's no "enter/exit" level editor button, and to leave testing and go back to editing you have to go to the game's File menu. it's not executed super well, especially considering how much constant iteration designing puzzles requires basically... Cool game. but it truly does feel like it came out of the early 90s- often for the worse- and that makes it really hard to recommend. with some modern improvements & tweaks (and more consistently good level design), this'd be an easy recommend
• gamedeal user

  Apr 13, 2018

  this is a good game, Bill