OK, there are a lot of games out there whre you spit things at encroaching waves or chains of things. That’s leading a lot of people to decry casual games as a bunch of clones, and to some degree there is truth to that. But actually, some of these “clones” are better than others, and in this case, Chameleon Gems is actually more innovative than a lot of similar games. Though, I do wish they could have gone a further on their choice of a main character. A stone amphibian with or without a tail is still, at the end of the day, a stone amphibian.

The basic gameplay is very familiar for players of Zuma, Tumblebugs, or other such ball-shooters. In this case the “balls” are beautiful gems on a little track. What’s neat, though, is that these gems are “stacked” so that some are on top of others, and you can make you matches in 2 dimensions, so you can match 3 gems up/down or left/right, or any combination. To be honest, most of the time, I was only looking at the bottomgem, but now and then when I couldn’t find a match immediately, I could look at the stacked gems and make vertical matches. Later in the game this becomes more and more useful.

And in truth, what I really appreciated about this was not just that it was somewhat innovative, but that there was some real point to using 3D in the game. Too many casual games use 3D simply because the developers think “3D is one more D better than 2D, so it must be an improvement.” In truth, unless you are actually moving your gameplay into that third dimension, rendering a game in 3D often looks worse than a really well done 2D interface. In this case, the 3D rendering is sharp and pretty, but also meaningful to the gameplay.

As for a story, well… there is this big stone chameleon and he projectile vomits gems. Because that’s apparently what big stone chameleons do. I couldn’t find a lot more story than that, but if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me. There was a kind of offhand reference to the whole chameleon thing with a “skin buying” system that gave your chameleon special powers, but beyond that, the main character could have been a lawn sprinkler. Actually, that’s a cool idea.

In all, it’s one of the better clones with enough originality to give it a reason to be, and enough polish to make it good it it’s own right. If you like gem/ball shooting games, it’s probably a good bet for you.

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