While you can argue that budget-minded titles can deserve a little slack, an entire generation of indie games on Switch and even loads of compelling games on mobile platforms beg to differ. In the earlier days of downloadable content, games coming in at $10 or under generally seemed to get a bit of a pass. Now, with an eShop bursting at the seams and more downloadable games out there than any one person could possibly play, the landscape has changed. At the $20 level you can expect full-on triple-A quality, just perhaps with less overall content or some other general compromises. Even at the $5 and less level there have been well-crafted, though perhaps more minimalist, titles in the pipeline as well. 

With all of that in mind, no matter what you’re bringing to the market you’d better put some effort into it, and that’s where a title like Color Road ends up being pretty disappointing. Essentially a visually-simplistic version of an endless runner, though injected with a bit more of an immediate challenge than you’d normally see. Everything here is about keeping an eye on your ball and its current color, trying to ensure you effectively switch between lanes in order to never collide with a ball of a different color. To complicate matters, elements like ramps will regularly change the color on you so you’ll have to pay attention and keep up to ensure you don’t end your run earlier than necessary.

The problem is, the developers have really gone all in on this concept, and that’s all that’s really driving the experience. Whether it’s the normal game mode or the various challenge modes, in the end everything revolves around this color-switching ball dynamic, with stages simply getting a bit more hectic and challenging the further you go, but pretty well nothing else showing up to help spice anything up. No, the game isn’t mindlessly easy by any means, but just because something is capable of being challenging that also doesn’t inherently make it fun or even engaging. 

What doesn’t really make sense here is that for well over a decade runners of all types have grown and evolved even on mobile platforms. They’ve had free, ad-driven, games you can play on your phone that have roughly the same basic concept (aside from the focus on color switching) and general style of play but with more colorful and engaging graphics as well as power-ups or other more surprising elements to try to keep you interested. By comparison to even many of those titles Color Road simply comes up short, even worse trying to get you to buy cosmetic DLC for a game that really doesn’t fully earn its initial price tag. I suppose there can be people out there who could appreciate it as a simple distraction, but for the most part this feels like a game that set the bar very low for itself and succeeded in creating something that simply isn’t very unique or interesting.