Overall, this game is very well thought out and very well made, and the developer of the game is very active in helping to sort out issues that other players have with the game.
For a $13 up-front price, you get over 3,000 pictures. If you delve further into how the total number of pictures are distributed, roughly half of them will fall under the XXS or XS categories, both of which can be solved in under 30 minutes.
If you go to the other extreme, there are about 20 XL puzzles which range from 130,000-261,000 pixels and can be expected to take 20-60 hours to solve.
The rest of the puzzles fall under the remainder of the categories which can take anywhere from 1 hour to 10 hours per image to solve.
Overall, if you add up the total time for every puzzle: ~1700x30 = 51,000 minutes or 850 hours of play. 20x40 is another 800 hours of play, and the other 1650x2 would be another 3400 hours of play. So if you wanted to solve every base puzzle in the game, it would take you over 5,000 hours of play, and this does not even include the Steam Workshop content, but I will get into that later.
Now you might be thinking: Well there's a lot of puzzles, so a lot of them are going to be of low quality (in terms of the base puzzles). I have not found that to be the case so far. Every puzzle that I have started or completed have been joys to solve, and have been very well crafted. I have yet to find a single low quality picture in the whole lot of puzzles available. This comment ONLY applies to the base puzzles though.
There are also three gameplay modes: Competitive Relax, Relax, and Game. Relax mode is just like it sounds, color in the pictures without anything to time you or make you hurry or anything else. Just nice relaxing coloring. Competitive Relax mode is the same thing as Relax mode, except that there is a timer, and you get props for being the fastest to finish a picture.
Game mode is a unique mode that makes a game out of coloring in the pictures, all with it's own objectives and other targets. While it is pretty original, I find this game mode off-putting, as it isn't the original coloring of pictures that I have grown to love. If you want to get into playing this game mode, I would highly recommend you read the guide that the developer wrote, as it will help you immensely to play the Game mode.
In terms of the developer for this game, the one that converses with all of the players via the Discussions page and sometimes in private messages is incredibly supportive, adding features that the player-base is requesting and fixing bugs that are found pretty quickly after they are found. This developer is one of the most helpful and supportive developers of the player base that I have ever come across on this site.
Now, you get into the fact that you can create your own puzzles either from scratch or by importing pictures from the Internet into the game, and that they can be a maximum size of 512x512, with a maximum of 256 different colors, and that is where this game really shines. None of the other coloring games that I have played on Steam offer this function as it would literally cripple their source of income for any additional DLC that they might want to release in the future. I must say, good on the developers of this game to offer this feature, as it really brings this coloring game to the next stratosphere in terms of replayability and entertainment.
That, combined with the integration of the Steam Workshop means there will always be more puzzles for you to solve, but that brings me to a few negatives for this game:
1. The overall quality of the Workshop puzzles are not on par with the images included with the base game. You will have to hunt through all of the puzzles available in the Workshop to find the ones that could possibly be high quality.
2. I seem to be encountering a few bugs while playing this game and recording at the same time...the first is the game just basically crashes without any error message and the other bug that I have found is that my total pixel count is incorrect now. Now, for a game like this, where there are achievements for getting a certain number of pixels colored in, the second bug is a pretty major bug. Now, this is not a true negative for this game, as these two bugs are extremely rare, and I seem to be the only player that is encountering them, but I still have to put this in my review, as it seems to happen while I am playing and recording fairly often...
Overall, this game is well worth the original $13 investment for the original 3000+ pictures, as well as the ability to create your own new puzzles and the ability to download more off of the Steam Workshop. This is the flagship coloring game available on Steam as of right now, and all of the other coloring games will have to do a lot to match up to this game.
