Big man on campus When I first heard that the team that made Ico was making another game I was intrigued. Though not a huge commercial success, Ico became a cult classic and, along with Katamari Damacy, the poster child for innovative, artistic gameplay. While not necessarily one of those folks who feels video games are destined to move from the realm of entertainment to art, I'm always interested in seeing game developers try something new or unusual. The story for their new game was fairly simple: a young hero must seek out and slay the sixteen colossi which hold the key to resurrecting his girlfriend who's dead or in a coma or something of a similar pleasant sort. Those tidbits of information being essentially all I knew of the game, I sat down with my PS2 and a copy of Colossus the other day with the feeling that I was perhaps going to experience something exciting and different in the world of video games. So, did Colossus live up to these expectations? Well...
Doing the hokey-pokey First a little overview of the mechanics of the game. I guess the closest thing I can compare Colossus's gameplay to would be one of the more recent Legend of Zelda games, except all you do is fight bosses. This is a fairly gross oversimplification, but for lack of a better comparison it will have to do. Essentially, the game is broken up into sixteen chapters that each begin with your character riding out on his faithful steed in search of the next tough, brute colossus to viciously slaughter. Each colossus is tracked down by utilizing your magical sword that projects a narrow beam of light when pointed in the direction of the colossus (satellite navigation system, anyone?). You have to fight the colossi in a specific order, as your sword will only point towards the one the game would like you to beat the living crap out of next. Upon encountering your foe you must quickly attempt to discern a weak point and the best manner of attacking said weak point, then do so before you are stomped flat. This usually involves clambering up the colossus's hairy bits (ewwww!) to get to his head, then stabbing the large glowing sigil until the big guy drops dead. Along with your sword, your only other tool is a longbow that you will occasionally require to tag a colossus from a distance to bring him into position for a sword poke. Obviously in your first few battles this is a fairly simple procedure, while towards the end of the game you have to start concocting some pretty elaborate, ingenious plans to take the colossi out.
The game also utilizes a stamina meter. Whenever your character is clinging somewhere (for dear life or for his climbing pleasure, as the case may be) he starts to lose stamina, and once his stamina is gone he lets go. During boss fights a significant aspect of the battle involves rationing how much time you spend clinging and how much time you spend standing upright and waiting for your stamina meter to refill. This can be tricky, since when you are standing you are more at risk of being hurled off when the boss thrashes about. Needless to say, when clinging to a vertical surface, standing isn't really an option unless you are into one of those x-treme sports where falling far and hitting your head really hard is considered fun, in which case you are probably playing this game in an entirely different manner.
Is that your intricate hair texture or are you just happy to see me?
Okay, I'm a positive-thinking kind of guy, so let's talk about Colossus's good points. For one thing, it's probably the best looking game out there for the PS2. Colossus's world is an absolutely gorgeous place where waterfalls cascade down hundreds of feet, light flickers through forest canopies, wind blows clouds of dust across cracked clay plains, and silent ruins loom monolithically in the distance. It's a good thing the environments are this detailed too, since there won't really be much else to keep your attention during your long rides between colossi. Speaking of the colossi, it seems strange to call hulking, hairy behemoths beautiful, but that's really the only way I can describe them. Each shaggy beast lumbers about realistically, hair ruffling with each movement and beady red eyes displaying an amazing amount of emotion. There were even a few times when I felt a little disheartened about having to kill the poor guys, as I really just wanted to sit there and watch them stomp around for a while. The only area where I felt the game was a little lacking visually was in your hero's run. To put it plainly, he totally runs like a girl, with arms flapping limply by his sides with each stride. I eventually just had him holding his sword at all times, as he seemed to grip his weapon in a more manly fashion (chuckle!) when he ran.
Sound wise the game is just as solid. Most of the time it is silent except for the chirp of birds, the whistle of the wind, and the clomp of your horse's hooves against the ground. However, as you near the next colossus some soft, vaguely melancholic music may start up. During the beginning of your battles as you run screaming from the colossus rapidly bearing down upon you something suitably intense will be playing, and when you finally get the colossus into a prone position where you can really let him have it (man, I'm all about the innuendo in this one) the music quickly turns inspiringly epic.
I can't really say much about the voice acting since the developers made up their own language for the game. What a neat trick when you don't feel like writing a real script! It sounded like it fit in that Japanese fairly tale sort of way, though, which I guess is all that's important.
A diamond in the rough These things are all quite outstanding on their own, but the grandeur of the game really becomes apparent when they all come together. Picture, if you will, a lake in a crater where the sunken ruins of an ancient civilization poke up through the water's surface. A great stone bird perches atop one of the highest peaks. You creep out onto a flat stone platform and fire an arrow at the beast to get its attention. Irritated at the puny intruder, the bird takes flight and swoops down to turn you into a fine paste. At the last second, however, you leap over the bird's talons and onto it's back. Enraged, the bird climbs several hundred feet and begins careening about, swooping around the broken ruins and coming dangerously close to the crater's walls. You cling on for dear life as the bird furiously tries to shake you loose, the background music sounding frantic and intense. As you notice the creature begin to tire, you slowly but determinedly start to crawl towards its wing tip where you spy a blue, glowing rune. Reaching your destination you draw your blade, holding it aloft for a moment to gather power, then plunge it into the beast's flesh at the point of the rune. The creature lets out a shriek and thrashes madly, but you hold tight, sensing victory. As you plunge your sword in again and again the music picks up, changing to a heroic theme as your foe's lifeblood pours out. You hammer your blade home one final time, the monster tenses, the music crescendos, and the fell beast plummets into the lake. Pretty exciting, huh?
That, my friends, is where the true brilliance of the game shines through. Every once in a while there are moments which will remind even the most jaded gamer why he started playing games in the first place. Things just come together in such a perfect way that you will almost feel like you're right there, taking part in the battle yourself. At those moments, the game totally blows away everything else that's out there right now, and most of what's come before. If this is the case, though, why only a grade of 7.0? Allow me to illuminate further.
The good, the bad, and the horrendous If you carefully read the paragraph above, you will notice that I said that things come together brilliantly "every once in a while". The problem is the rest of the time. For every time you instinctively discern what you are supposed to do in a battle with a colossus and things play out perfectly, there will be another time where you have no idea how to proceed and spend upwards of half-an-hour floundering about getting killed or just chased around. This is extremely irritating, and it will happen fairly frequently, thus explaining how a game that is just sixteen encounters winds up being almost ten hours long. I'm no slouch in Zelda-style boss-battles, where you have to sort of figure things out as you go, but some of the convoluted ways in which you have to go about killing these guys are pretty ridiculous. If you start taking a really long time the game will offer up a couple of paltry hints, but most of these are pretty worthless and wind up essentially saying, "Fight better." When you have the feeling you need to get up high to defeat the boss but you can't, even after fifteen minutes of struggling, figure out how to do so, you really don't need to hear the game say, "Seek higher ground."
The frustration factor isn't helped by the fact that both the camera and the hit detection are on the finicky side. Sometimes you'll make a jumping grab that looks like you never should have made, while other times you will tumble helplessly away as you slide off someplace you easily should have held on to. On occasion I even simply fell through certain surfaces I was standing on. All the while the camera twirls like a playful dervish, always pointing at everything but what you need to see. During one fight I had a very fast colossus barreling towards me when suddenly the camera whipped around to give me a close up of my character's face. Excellent. It's adjustable, but when you're already holding down three buttons in preparation for a particularly difficult leap, you don't have an extra finger to fiddle with the camera as well. Plus, the camera tries to pull back to its original position and I'd often feel like I was wrestling with the wheel of a ship in the middle of a terrible storm. This tends to make trying to figure out how to kill the colossus even more difficult, as it gives that you-can't-do-that-in-this-game feeling to things that, perhaps, you really are supposed to be doing.
I can't even begin to express how maddening this made certain already difficult battles. There were points when, after missing the same jump for the tenth time during a forty-minute battle because of a camera that suddenly turned at the wrong moment, my rage took physical form as a red, shrieking goblin which ran about the room breaking things, scratching the walls, and consuming household pets.
Nobody's perfect Hopefully you're starting to see my dilemma in reviewing this game. On the one hand, some parts of it are so good I truly felt moved, while other parts were so bad I felt moved to vomit. If I may use an analogy, playing this game is sort of like being married to an amazing woman with a fatal flaw. She's a great cook, she always knows the right thing to say, she's totally devoted to you, and to top it all off, she's drop-dead gorgeous. However, every once in a while, she uncontrollably craps the bed. Now, you feel guilty getting mad at her about it, because you know it's not really her fault, plus she's so good in all those other ways, but that still doesn't change the fact that it's awful. So it is with this game. You can tell that its heart is in the right place, and when it delivers, it delivers in spades, but it's still hard to get over all the frustrating time spent fumbling about getting your ass kicked by giant stone creatures.
Thusly my grade of 7.0 stands. I feel that's a decent compromise between the high nine that I would give some parts and the low five that I would give others. At the least it's worth a rental for those who have patience and are interested in something a little different. You'll definitely get a number of rewarding moments from it. If, on the other hand, you are easily frustrated, or disinterested in all games that don't have the words "Tony" or "Hawk" in them, then you probably want to give this one a pass.
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| PlayerPlaza Games
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