Chippy | PC (Steam) | Review

---

Mention the word “chippy” to someone in the UK and you’ll most likely induce mouth-watering thoughts of battered cod, mushy peas and chips drenched in salt ‘n’ vinegar. Having spent some time with Rust developer Facepunch Studios’ latest effort, however, the word now conjures up delicious memories of epic boss battles, as well as deep fried fish.

---

by Liam
Andrews

---

@liam_andrews5

---

Developer: Facepunch Studios
Publisher: Facepunch Studios
Platform: PC (Steam)
Players: 1

---

Chippy is a twin-stick bullet-hell shooter in which you control a small ship that, apart from the big googly eye at its centre, looks like it could’ve leapt right out of an Asteroids arcade machine. With this endearing little fella, you take on a series of bosses (14 in total) in top-down encounters. 

​The first boss you fight serves as little more than a glorified tutorial, introducing players to Chippy’s basic gameplay mechanics and features. Here, you’ll learn how to de-limb the large, labyrinthine-like creatures by – and you’ll see what they did here – chipping away at pixelated weak points to expose protected cores, all the while avoiding both targeted and area of effect attacks. Like one of those adult colouring books it’s a simple premise, but surprisingly gratifying.

You’re also shown how to use power-ups to your advantage, earned through either destroying cores or via pick-ups that appear randomly. These perks are usually handed out in pairs, with the player only allowed to collect one or the other, and can often mean the difference between victory or defeat.

With it only taking a single hit to destroy your ship, shields, which allow you to absorb slightly more damage, were our perk of choice, though there are others, both passive and non, that are equally effective in certain situations. Learning what function each power-up serves takes a bit of trial and error, with some - like slo-mo, canon and double gun - being self-explanatory, while others - such as blink and fade - were less so, leading to some unfortunate early deaths.

You can ‘hijack’ replays, letting you take control and practice a specific phase of a fight. It’s a fantastic idea and a feature that should be the new standard in future boss rush games.

Occasionally, bosses will throw out power-ups surrounded by a red hue. Grabbing one of these glowing orbs grants the ability within, but also surrounds your ship with an encircling wall of death that’s very tricky to avoid, introducing a further risk-versus-reward element to collecting pick-ups.

​Boss fights are multi-staged encounters that have you duking it out with at least two versions of your opponent, with the difficulty, intensity and scale of enemies ramping up after every successive victory. And boy, do things get tough. Enemies eventually fill the small, square battlefield with a dizzying, hypnotic mass of projectiles in an attempt to stop you. Dying is something you’ll be doing a lot in Chippy, but respawning is instant, and each failure is more a learning opportunity than a frustrating setback.

If you do find yourself completely stuck – as we did during one particularly gruelling fight with a boss that could regrow its missing tentacles and cores – scrolling up through the leaderboards and watching the readily available replays of top players is a rather neat way of learning how to beat tougher enemies. By mirroring the fastest player’s technique, we went from utterly hopeless to 15th in the global leaderboards in less than an hour.

You can even ‘hijack’ a replay at any moment, letting you take control and practice a specific phase of a fight without having to put in the work beforehand. It’s a fantastic idea and a feature that we think should be the new standard in future boss rush games.

While most bosses share similar fundamentals – destroy or remove multiple secondary cores as quickly as possible whilst avoiding attacks to expose a larger, central core – there are occasional outliers, such as a fight that has you surviving waves of minions while automated lasers drill through their leader’s thick shields, which help to keep things fresh.

Facepunch have also done a decent job of imparting character and personality - there’s a very creepy maggot-like creature, for example - to what are essentially sentient mazes through just a few lines of text. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the arenas that house them, with the same plain black backdrop used for fights regardless of the type of environment bosses are supposed to inhabit.

​Even if, like this reviewer, you’re not that into bullet-hell or boss rush games (despite having also enjoyed Furi), we’d recommend you try Chippy. While we’d love to see the game reach additional platforms, it’s inexpensive and doesn’t require a top-tier gaming PC to run. It might be tough as nails in places, to an almost daunting extent, but it’s also exhaustingly moreish and incredibly satisfying. Like any good chippy, really.

Pros

• Addictive, satisfying gameplay
• Instant respawning avoids potential frustration
• Superb audio on the whole
• Leaderboard replays and the excellent hijack feature help to overcome tough fights

Cons

• Arenas lack personality
• Some deaths feel cheap
• Initially confusing power-ups
• Where’s the Switch version?!

8/10​