xylia

[Elle]

This is a Playstation 2 release, and can be bought for $20 as a 'Greatest Hits' game.

Supposedly a sequel or prequel to the studio's first game, "Ico", Colossus is an adventure-mixed-with-puzzle-solving kind of game. The screenshots make you think "another damn fantasy rpg", but the gameplay is hardly dull.

You play as 'Wander', a warrior who makes a deal with a god to slay sixteen colossi in return for the soul of his loved one. With your (unbelievably invincible) horse, you get to ride across an incredibly expansive terrain, seeking out and destroying the monsters.

Each monster plays like its own level. You have to find weak points and climb up to target areas to stab and take it down.

Initially finding the monsters can be a bit of a chore, as your map is humungous. Your sword acts as a beacon: when you raise it up, the sunlight catches and points you to your next task.

The controls take a while to get used too, as well. At first, it will feel awkward and frustrating, but once you play through a monster or two, you get rather comfortable with it, and it does work.


Playing this game is a delight. The monsters are beautiful and each one offers a unique challenge. There are flying dragons and birds, underwater tortoises and snakes, and even two tiny, man-sized colossi to rodeo-style wrestle into submission.

Once you play through the game once, you unlock a "Hard" level that cuts your strength and health meter a bit, which means you must get up on the monsters faster, and take it down sooner. Play through that mode, and you get "Hard 2", which, strangely, doubles your health. In return, you have more target points to climb to and hit.


I really enjoy this game, and do find myself replaying it over and over to experience the colossi again. It's beautiful and challenging, and doesn't waste your time with fetch quests or irritating boxes of dialogue. Straightforward boss battling.

Also, check the horse. That thing gets stepped on, blasted, thrown around, and it is invincible. You can try to jump off a cliff, but that horse will stop and you will fly off and it will watch you.


So check it out! It's a unique experience. Just don't look for anything too involved---you'll put only about 20-30 hours tops on this bad boy, depending on your skill level.

[canterrain]

I'm going to have to agree.

This is a very unique game in that, most games that resemble this in any fashion have levels with bad guys you have to kill in order to get to a boss.

This takes out those bad guys. You just have 16 really wickedly hard bosses to kill. And it can be challenging, frustrating, a chore, because as much as it is an action game it is a puzzle game.

Yeah, and it is apparently a 'prequel' to ICO. How that is I won't explain, cause that gives away the ending.

If there's one thing I don't like about the game... it's the horse. Or rather, controlling the horse. It's hard to mount him, you have to be in the exact spot. And in effort to make controlling him much like riding an actual horse (you have a button to kick him, which you have to do fairly frequently to keep him going... and rather than another button to stop him you have to pull back on a joystick like pulling on reins... but this joystick also controls the view so you often mess up the camera angle while doing it... so on and so forth) they made it difficult to control him and somewhat unenjoyable. I'd almost rather the lazy route and make him drive like a car. One button you hold to go forward, one button to stop.

The sword light thing is handy to find the monsters with, but it doesn't always work very well. Hard to tell where it is pointing to.

Still, if you have time and the money... this is an excellent buy.

[Elle]

I found that if you just hold X down whilst on Aggro/whateverhisname is, he'll do a fullspeed gallop the whole time without all that kicking nonsense.

And let's not get started about how many times I go around the wrong damn mountain following that sword-compass-from-hell.