Actually, the point is to avoid collisions.
Perusing Steam grants a person a certain access to a seemingly endless amount of content he/she never knew existed. Often, it is content that a person didn’t need to know existed; other searches yield metaphorical gold mines. I, myself, have come across a number of games obscured in the halls of perpetual Steam titles that I love, so I am always eager to continue my search (and so often, these games are priced under $20). When I was handed a code to review The Collider 2, I was eager to begin.
The Collider 2 is a sequel to unsurprisingly named The Collider. Having not experienced the first title but watching gameplay videos and trailers, I felt pretty good about heading into the newly released game. As the loading screens booted up on my PC, I learned that The Collider 2 runs on VR sets, which intrigued me. Unfortunately, I don’t have a VR set to test the game with, so that part of my review must be omitted.
So what is The Collider 2? It’s exactly what it doesn’t sound like. The point of The Collider 2 is to avoid collisions while navigating your way quickly through the interior of a hostile battlecruiser. All you need is a mouse to successfully play this game, as you simply control your starship through a high speed obstacle course, occasionally picking up coins and artifacts or shooting objects (shooting is accomplished by hovering your ship’s reticle over an attackable object).
The Collider 2 is split into multiple stages, each with about 10 levels of varying objectives. Unfortunately, the objectives are all of a select breed. The majority of the missions in The Collider 2 are of my least favorite variety – timed speed runs. In order to clear these mission types, you must navigate and boost your ship through the battlecruiser in the allotted time (you’re ranked with three medals per level; all you need is one medal to succeed). Artifact collection is the second level type. All that is required of you for this stage is to fly through the blue orbs (artifacts) and collect the majority of them. The third mission type requires you to destroy red cubes. Again, all you must do here is hover your reticle over the cube to fire. Lastly, you come face-to-face with a boss level at the end of each stage. In these, you navigate your way through a brief obstacle course until you reach the boss. To defeat the bosses, you must shoot red orbs on their bodies and then focus fire on an orb that is exposed once the initial orbs are destroyed.
For the first few stages, The Collider 2 provides a lot of entertainment. Fortunately, the levels become progressively more difficult. Unfortunately, learning the patterns is easy, and the only challenge comes with the longer lives of the bosses. As you continue to venture through the battlecruiser, you level up and acquire currency. This is used to buy upgrades, skins for your star ships, and new star ships. Procuring a new ship seems cool at first, and I was super eager to test out my new space wheels – until I learned that the stages and levels dictate what ship you could use.
The game itself is fairly brief, even though it contains over 150 levels. For example, I cleared the first three stages (30 levels) in about 30 minutes. To add value, The Collider 2 provides players with an additional competitive mode where they can compete against friends. Outside of that, there isn’t much to do besides clear all of the stages, attain all medals, and purchase all vehicles/paint variations.
Overall, The Collider 2 offers a brief wave of fun for its cheap $9.99 price tag. You won’t find endless hours of gameplay here, but you will find a challenge at neck break speeds. Acquiring new ships and skins for those ships is an enjoyable endeavor, but it quickly dulls when you can’t use the new ships where you want to (in the story mode). With no narrative to be had, the neat graphics and briefly fun gameplay don’t do much to save this title. At the fairly cheap price tag, it may be worth the time if it’s your style of game; if not, I’d recommend avoiding this collision.