Hands-on with Colossatron: Massive World Threat - Halfbrick's match-three mecha snake sim
Mecha Space Draggin'
Just like Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride before it, Halfbrick's upcoming robo-snake smash-'em-up Colossatron: Massive World Threat is shaping up to be another dangerously addictive time sink.
It's essentially a match-three-style puzzler, but instead of gems or runes you're matching the segmented body pods of a gigantic, city-crushing mechanical snake monster.
Put three pods of the same colour together and they'll merge to form a weapon. And if you snap together a pair of primary colours, you'll create special weapons and defensive powers.
You're doing all this colour-matching to help your snake fend off wave upon wave of nuisance humans, who are attempting to halt your campaign of destruction.
You can also tap and hold on to the screen to unleash a focused barrage, which will annihilate nearby enemies and give you breathing room to organise your pods for the next wave.
On top of all of this, you can occasionally insert special pods, ranging from shields to powerful screen-clearing nukes - just be careful about where you insert them as you might break that combo you were working on.
In Colossatron, the snake moves and fires weapons by itself, so your job is simply to drag pods. It's a dead simple system to pick up and play with, and there's no need for newcomers to sit through a laborious tutorial.
But the game quickly ramps up the challenge in response to your experimentation with each upgrade.
Each wave introduces deadlier enemies in greater numbers, forcing you to consider which tactic to invest in - will fewer, more powerful pods make short work of the humans, or is it worth trying to cover your bases with a conga line of various weaker pods?
We didn't have a chance to get to see how Halfbrick's trademark social features and mini-missions affect the game. But the simple, unadulterated joy of blowing up buildings and vehicles as a rainbow-coloured mechanised super snake is good enough for now.
We'll let you know when the tight-lipped Aussie developer has a release date, a price, and more details. For now, check out the game in motion below:
