Coloristic 2 review

Coloristic 2 is an unassuming puzzle game about drawing colorful paths on a grid. There's a simplicity, elegance, and satisfaction to filling your screen with color that then gets challenged as new mechanics and more byzantine layouts start appearing. There are a few blemishes that hold it back, but Coloristic 2 still shines through its clear and clever puzzle design.

Full of color

The core concept of Coloristic 2 is simple, though somewhat hard to explain. Each level is a grid that starts out mostly empty. On this grid are circles of color with a number in the middle. If you tap and drag on these colored circles, they fill spots on the grid and tick down the number on the circle. Your goal is to fill the entire grid until all of your colored circles reach zero.

At the start of Coloristic 2, you'll fly through levels. Early stages feature small grids with one colored circle that can be completed in seconds. Then, around the tenth level, things escalate. You get more colors, grids become irregularly shaped, and-eventually-tiles start getting new markings that create new game rules to further complicate things.

Line it up

These new rules can do things like create portals for your color lines to travel through to different sections of the grid, or they can only accept a specific color in order to be filled. Over time, these mechanics get mixed and matched to create some truly mind-bending puzzles. The underlying goal stays the same though, and with a little logic and spatial reasoning, no challenge ever feels insurmountable.

Perhaps the best part of Coloristic 2 is its meticulous puzzle design. Not every puzzle is meant to be a complete stumper, and it's just as fun to finish a level in 30 seconds as it is to spend several minutes re-working your strategies on something a little trickier. Some of this has to do with little details, like the soft haptic feedback of your phone as you draw lines, but it's mostly just because there is a sense of craftsmanship in most levels that's easy to admire.

Not always straightforward

I say "most levels" when referring to Coloristic 2's attention-to-detail because there are definitely some instances where the game stops operating by its own rules. Specifically, there are a handful of levels that don't require you to completely fill your grid with colors to move on. You can simply get all of your colored circles down to zero, and the game counts that as a win condition, even if you have some empty grid slots showing.

Speaking of puzzling choices, Coloristic 2 also has a somewhat odd control scheme that takes some getting used to. Tapping and dragging to draw lines of color works just fine, buf if you ever need to move backward to take back a move or change direction, Coloristic 2 requires that you tap the origin point of your line to reset the whole thing. There's no way to move back one space or otherwise undo single moves. There's a specific reason for this that you learn as you get further into the game, but there are large chunks of Coloristic 2 where you wish there was a more convenient way to reset and no apparent reasons explaning why you can't.

The bottom line

Coloristic 2 is largely successful at delivering smart, inspired puzzling using simple concepts and visuals. There are times where the game doesn't explain how or why some of its rules work the way they do, but that shouldn't get in your way of enjoying this great game.