Chroma is a free-to-play musical shooter from the creators of Rock Band and CS:GO

What do you do once you've made the best party game ever? If you're Rock Band developers, Harmonix, you team up with the creators of the latest Counter-Strike to form a superband, and then start work on a free-to-play team shooter. Chroma will feature "shooter mechanics" that "tie the game's soundtrack directly to combat, traversal, and more," according to the announcement post on the Chroma blog . Each class in your team's violent band will use the beat differently, and major drops or tone shifts in the track can change the level geometry "raising sniper towers, adding cover, and more in sync with the music."

Neat. You'll also be able to customise your load-out to affect the types of blips, bloops and bowel-shattering dubstep bwaaarms that come out of your weapons. ShackNews note that it'll be important to choose the timing of your shots. Sniper shots do more damage, rockets change direction and grenades explode on the beat. It's Harmonix' first shooter, so the expertise of CS:GO's developers, Hidden Path, will prove useful.

"We're also thrilled to release an alpha version of this game and to evolve it in collaboration with our players," writes Harmonix founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos. "We can't wait to hear what people think of this new approach to both first-person shooters and music games.” It's due out sometime this year, and you can sign up for the closed alpha on the Chroma site , if you like the look of the first teaser trailer that is.

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.