Colossus Mission - adventure in space, arcade game Reviews

"Colossus Mission - adventure in space, arcade game" is a somewhat unimaginative Moonlander/SpaceWar!/Asteroids-in-a-maze game where you control the space shuttle in a cavern/complex and must move through each level using Moonlander/SpaceWar! style turn and thrust movement. There's a number of obstacles to avoid as you need to keep your health up, and running into stuff hurts you, but there's "healing" blobs strewn about to help you keep going. On the upside this is story driven as you explore some alien ship but get teleported somewhere else. While some effort went into game design, and there's over 70 bespoke levels (none of which are fun to play), the technical implementation was phoned in. While the game works it's laughably bad in some parts... like the space shuttle you control is a 2D sprite that's been rendered from an angle, so you get this bizarre, frankly stupid view of your ship rotating around and the shadows etc looking just wrong... it's really terrible. Did they flip the asset for the spaceship? That might explain why it looks so misplaced. The rest of the game isn't any better, either. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. "Colossus Mission - adventure in space, arcade game" is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.