Shades Of The Colossus By Rocketeer - A Pleasant Surprise

Shades of the Colossus is a game created by rocketeer

My sploder absence is no longer, I'm back to feed your hunger, reviewing for you today is elcrossix, your favourite reviewer (or least). Now, I do doubt any of you remember me, but I have a few featured games you may have noticed me from.

This afternoon I'll be reviewing a game by rocketeer (now I've got to admit, cool username), Shades of the Colossus. I don't know much about him, I've seen a few of his reviews (and one recently, good luck on Editor, my friend) and he seems pretty cool. But this is his first featured game and I know how exciting that can be as I experienced it myself, along with that feature I'm going to grant him a review.

Shades of the Colossus is tagged along with a brilliant storyline, long in length (for a sploder game) and it matches the gameplay nicely. It's a nice read before playing the game and sets the tone for what hopefully is a great game.

The game has an introduction level to start off and equips you with an extremely generous amount of health and power ups if you ask me, but there's a 9 leveled game ahead of me, they will likely be of need. (I was still impatient enough to skip past all of the inscriptions, sorry rocket, I don't like it when games do that :()

The scenery (and real gameplay) begins in level 2, in something that seems like a ditch should you know better, the tile choice was very select and matched the scene and offered some cool looking scenery. The background matched the block selection and set together as something rather pretty (did I really just use that word?). Interesting look, more like it.

The gameplay was a little slow due to some lag, but that might be my internet, I was having some troubles with the community being slow before too, so I'll brush that off, it was usually fast paced and for throughout the multiple levels I played through, it was quite addicting. The gameplay forced me to rush into a lot of things, too, more explanation later.

I'll combine this paragraph with both puzzles and traps. It might not seem like a puzzle or trap game on first glance, but it had a few, or a lot of sequences that could serve as such. CIosers, crushers, switches and more were used to a nice effect in trapping me on many occasions, as did a lot of other aspects, the refresh button was used so much I think I killed it (hence the reason I stopped to start my review). This game really makes me wish we could retry individual levels after loss, like the Physics Puzzle Game Creator. Many puzzling areas also cost a tad of your healthbar each time with good design, slowly counting towards frustration.

Games need to be fun, really, and this was a very fun and addicting game. I played it about 10 times, surpassing whole levels again just to get an inch further then the previous, to uncover more gems of the game that I hadn't before. I don't know what it is about the game that makes me want to keep playing, maybe it was my long absence and my starvation to play, and possibly beat a quality game? Anyhow, it was a well designed game and very fun to play.

Storyline: 10/10

I know what you're going to say, a rating on a storyline? Psht, that's pathetic. But in a game like this the story stood out just as much, if not more then others that would usually be more important. One of the better storylines on sploder.

Scenery: 8/10

Pretty good from my view, but one thing that was slightly frustrating with the scenery was some blocks not as visible because of the lighting effects and I needed the radar to sometimes navigate more clearly (or maybe it's my bad eyesight...). And sometimes ladders which played a part in a few levels were hard to see.

Gameplay: 7.5/10

Despite some lag, the game was USUALLY well paced.

Puzzle / Trap: 6.5/10

They weren't the best, or most original and groundbreaking puzzles or traps, but they did play a small and useful part.

8/10

I think Shades of the Colossus was definitely feature worthy, a mighty fine game for rocketeer's first feature with some good scenery, gameplay and a great storyline. Keep it up.