Colossus Down review

Colossus Down tells the story of a young kid named Nika. She’s quite fed up with the world so she decided to destroy everything that she doesn’t consider cool. How? With the help of her combat mecha called MechaNika. Your goal? Destroy everything un-cool such as history books, planned obsolescence, kitschy dresses, never-ending sagas of boring video games, and pea soup. She’ll also be joined by her friend, Agatha and her Great Bleeding Pig, god of Carnivorism.

Colossus Down is a side-scrolling beat’em up where you go from A to Z where you’ll more often than not reach a level boss; a bigger threat to your mecha robot. MechaNika has a few attacks her up sleeve; it can attack with his metallic arms, fire rockets, and shock enemies. A few levels in, you’ll also start to unlock powerful attacks that come in handy when overwhelmed. For example, you can unlock a skill that allows MechaNika to teleport and hit enemies at random. As you progress and collect metal parts, you’ll be able to unlock additional special attacks.

In order to be able to upgrade the MechaNika, you need to destroy everything you can in each level as it’ll drop parts bits and parts that Nika will be able to use in between levels to unlock new special skills when you’ve collected enough. The health system is also unique and interesting. A damage meter will fill up as you take damage and you need to release the pressure to avoid overloading and exploding. This is also dependant on a different meter that contains coolant. If you run out of coolant, you’re screwed. Thankfully destroyed items and enemies drop some once in a while.

Another interesting feature is that the game features a few optional/decision-making circumstances. For example, in the beginning, you have the choice to kill your teacher and principal; doesn’t change much, but sparing their lives will unlock an Achievement. Further in the game, through damage, in a cutscene, Nika, i.e. you, is forced to make a decision: fix the mecha’s respawn feature or keep the materials to get all four special attacks. If you opt for the former, you’ll only be able to unlock 3 of the 4 attacks, but you’ll always respawn where you last exploded. If you choose the latter, this increases the challenge tenfold because if you explode, it’s game over.

The biggest issue here is that the game feels needlessly hard, with no accessibility features. Most of the time, you’ll be able to come through mostly unscathed, but some areas will pummel you with enemies and somehow a single police officer with a battering ram can knock a giant mech; problem is that if there’s more than 1, they can spam battering you down giving players little to no chance to survive. Additionally, enemy guns do crazy damage; you’ll see the overheating meter fill up like crazy while on the other hand, some human enemies can absorb so much damage before dying, it can feel unfair. Feels like the fair balancing between your attacks and enemy attacks was missed by a hair.

Colossus Down looks great; it has a great cartoon-like presentation; watching cutscenes, it felt like watching a cartoon show minus the voiceovers. Levels variation is far, but they are all very bright and colorful; which counters the game’s drastic theme of a 7 year old wanting to destroy everything. The soundtrack is ok at best; would’ve enjoyed voiceovers though. My main gripe is that there’s too much text; before and in-between levels; it’s annoying.

Colossus Down is a great addition to the beat’em up genre. Combat is solid, great attack variety and challenging, but fair, boss fights. While it does feel unfair and frustrating at times, having unlimited lives where you respawn where you died makes up for it, but in the long run, I can understand being annoyed in cases where enemies leave you no time to react until you explode. If you’re a fan of the genre, I say go for it. It’s a nice change of muscle-bound guys beating the living hell of each other.