The Collider 2, a following of the first one developed by Shortbreak Studios s.c, follows a ship speeding through a large mothership with several objectives to complete. With a huge resemblance to the Death Star run from Star Wars, you’re a small ship in a bigger ship, navigating tight spaces and shooting down enemies to eventually make it to the exit.
Story
Your main goal is to destroy the massive mothership that is currently bombing your planet, sending in countless ships to take out its vital systems. Whenever you run a mission and die you simply replace it with another ship. Through 4 types of missions you will work your way inside, taking it down 1 run at a time.
Completing all 54 missions will take around 2-4 hours, considering your skill at these types of games. You do need to get most of the medals for the missions, so replaying levels will become a staple of your game time.
Gameplay
In this racing hybrid game you will control your ship with the mouse only, moving it moves your ship and left clicking is for using Turbo. As you fly through the levels you can pick up coins for upgrades, shoot down targets and all around speed through the level and its obstacles. You can acquire powerups as you zoom past, allowing for infinite turbo, shields, 2x points and magnet for coins.
There are 4 game styles, Scout (race against the clock), infiltrate (collect alien tech), sabotage (shoot alien cubes), and fight (bosses). With each mission there are 3 medals to obtain, 1 for completing the mission with minimal results and 3 for the highest, either racing the fastest, destroying or collecting all aliens and so on. You will need to get a certain amount of medals to progress as each stage is locked, and the missions unlock as you complete each one sequentially.
To help you in the missions you can upgrade each ships Shield recharge speed, their turbo length and multiplier as well as the length of the powerups. These get increasingly costly, with ships reaching the thousands pretty quickly, meaning you will want to save some coins for later missions as they are locked to specific ships.
There is also a Survival/Endless mode where you go through all the difficulties of the missions, with length and turbo adding into your final score. If you’re on the scoreboard you will be rewarded when the tournament ends, first place gets 35000 coins, 2-6 get 15000, 7-25 get 6000, 26-100 get 2500 and 101+ get 1000, at least at the time of this review. This can be an invaluable way to get coins for upgrades and new ships.
Overall Thoughts and Feelings
The music lacks variety, I only really heard 1 track through most of the game as it loops from mission end to mission start. The pace of the song doesn’t really match up with the Scout missions due to the speed you need to travel at to pass them, if there was a more up-beat song for that mission type it would flow a lot better. The same goes for most of the other missions types, they need specific music that have very separate styles otherwise each match just feels the same.
As you level up your multiplayer is increased, making it much easier for gamers who have played longer to stay higher on the scoreboard easier. I feel this isn’t the best use of the levelling system, possible allowing new skins or improving your piloting skills would be a much better fit. Besides that the levels do give you coin rewards at certain points, but those coins are dearly needed to get better ships and powerups and locking the reward to levels feels a bit grindy, challenges would be better.
This game feels very suited to the VR environment and just as it happens it is VR compatible, outside of VR it isn’t that great. I’ve played Flash games and website based games that have done what this game does, some of them delving even further into story or skill progression. It is alright for the price tag but can get lost within the multitude of other VR “test” games.
Overall The Collider 2 gets a 7/10, it’s a nice challenge and the progression of difficulty is almost spot on however it lacks too much in skills and story development. Forcing you to buy ships locks later levels behind a paywall of coins that take too long to grind for, almost pushing you insanely towards the slightly biased tournament. If you enjoy racing games or games that require you threading the needle this is one for you, but you might be better off trying the genre out before getting this game.
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