Quick Look on Halfbrick’s Colossatron

December 19, 2013January 24, 2018

Halfbrick studios, the developers of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, presented their latest game incorporating elements from both color matching and tower defense games. Colossatron: Massive World Threat was released yesterday and already started piling up positive user reviews, so let’s take a quick look.

You play as the evil mechanical worm from outer space on his mission to destroy every single city on Earth and kill all the human. The only thing standing between you and your ultimate goal is the 4 star General Moustache and his massive army of tanks, planes, helicopters and other mechanized equipment that won’t mind breaking couple of rules to bring you down.

The game plays from the top-down perspective, simulating a live broadcast via the Action News 6 helicopter following you around and providing a clear overview of the battlefield. The worm (or the head to be precise) moves on its own, but the body parts that provide the raw firepower are entirely your responsibility. Each body segment represents a type of weapon that can be upgraded or mixed with other color segments to improve the overall efficiency. Additional segments drop from the enemies you kill and you can add or combine them to your body on-the-fly. Paying attention were you place some of the segments is a-must on later levels where certain parts of your body must be upgraded couple of times in order to defeat the level boss.

There are 3 primary color segments, (blue, yellow and red) and combining 3 continuous segments of the same color and level will provide an upgraded segment of the same type. You can also mix the 3 primary segments (of the same level) to unlock even more colors and make your worm/snake the ultimate killing machine. Each segment has its own strengths and weaknesses and finding the best possible combination can be pretty hard to pull off during battles with all the shiny bullets flying around and your “auto-pilot” stubbornly spinning in the wrong direction.

Colossatron has 2 game modes, the campaign mode provides 7 regions with couple of levels each, and the survival mode (with leaderboards) that can be played on all the worlds you already devastated. Each encounter in either mode will provide both cash and prisms, currencies used to upgrade various body parts (between missions), heal your damaged segments, reconfigure their order, or buy various power-ups to help you during the battle. Speaking of power-ups, some of them can be found while playing and adding them to your body will allow you to harvest their power instantly. Nukes, shields, rapid fire triggers, just to name a few. Gadgets are special upgrades that are provided for free each time you clear a region. They impact the gameplay directly as most of them allow you to take partial control over the Colossatron (snake charge for example), and they all have a cooldown timer attached.

Since prisms are the main currency that can be used to upgrade anything (even get more cash), revisiting some of the previous locations in the “survival mode” may be necessary if you intend to see your Colossatron fully upgraded one day. Or, you can simply dish out couple of bucks and get all the prisms you need from the in-app store. Now, this may sound a bit controversial to some people since Colossatron: Massive World Threat has a small price tag ($0.8) attached on the Play Store. Before you make your decision, know this: all currencies can be obtained by playing and nothing is really unreachable without spending real cash. This payment model might be the sweet-spot between outrageous IAPs (gameplay restrictive timers) and the expensive prices some developers decide to go with. After all, it’s you who gets a highly polished-action packed game that can be played for hours (for a price of a candy bar), while the developers still get the extra revenue from gamers that don’t mind spending couple of bucks more. Everybody wins.

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