The curse of getting old is seeing patterns in history start to reemerge, as is the case with The Collider 2, the latest tunnel shooter (is that a genre?) to appear for PC and now with VR support. When I say “latest” I am of course fondly recalling other tunnel shooters that can be traced back to 1992 when Digital Pictures released their live-action game Sewer Shark on the Sega CD and again in 1994 when it reappeared on the 3DO. Thankfully, The Collider 2 has a bit more going for it than a 24-year-old rail shooter laserdisc game, but not much.
Despite all the trailers and perfectly orchestrated screenshots in the Steam store, The Collider 2 is a linear tunnel shooter not all that different from an endless runner type game, only this one has an end, and it’s usually just a minute or two after it starts. The goal is simple. Take down the massive mother ship in your stylish Starfighter that you can deck out with cool paintjobs and upgrade with all sorts of progression enhancements like engine cool down, collectible magnets, shields, boosters, etc.
There are six stages, each with nine missions spread across a zigzagging flowchart that vary in theme and objectives such as Scout, Infiltrate, Sabotage, and Survive. No matter which type of mission you end up flying you are always going down the same circular tunnel doing basically the same things with only a few slight alterations thrown in based on mission type and just how far you are in the actual 54-mission campaign. Yes, the difficulty does ramp up and it does so with environmental obstacles more than tangible enemies.
As you fly down these narrow tubes there are various gaps and holes, you’ll need to navigate your ship through to avoid smacking a wall and restarting the mission. There are also gold coins to collect and depending on the mission you get to sometimes collect blue data orbs or destroy red cubes. Oh yeah…you’re on a timer too. Your ship has a plethora of upgrades that you can tweak in the hanger between missions using the currency you earn from completing missions and doing them well. Since time is always an issue, you’ll be tempted to mash the turbo trigger at the risk of overheating your engines. Upgrading your ship’s cool down will help with this and finding a frosty power-up in mid-mission will provide temporary unlimited boost with no threat of blowing the engines.
There is a nice progression of difficulty reflected in gradual alterations to the level design. In later levels those gates and portals will be rotating at variable speeds and direction. Tubes may open up into large interior areas where you may need to shoot some targets before turbo boosting through a hatch as the interlocking doors slam shut. There are moments of excitement spread across lots of repetitive tunnel navigation.
The first time I played The Collider 2 I didn’t have my Oculus Rift and the game got boring fast. I’m talking by the fourth mission when I realized this was all there was. When I got my Oculus Rift, I decided to see if it got any better and surprisingly, the 3D effect does add tremendous immersion to the experience but at the expense of some ridiculous head-movement controls. Playing on your monitor you simply use your gamepad to steer your ship through the tunnel environments, but when playing in VR you steer the ship by moving your head up, down, left, and right. It’s responsive and works well enough, but I feel like a complete idiot playing this way and my neck was sore the next day. Plus, steering with your head is in no way realistic or immersive. Interestingly enough, even though I have an Oculus Rift I had to choose HTV Vive in the pre-launch windows since the “Other VR” option would not launch the game but simply return to the Steam game page. There were other times when the menu system would corrupt within the game, and I had to restart to fix.
With its less-than-two-minute mission design, The Collider 2 seems more like a mobile game than something designed for PC, and VR was apparently a complete afterthought that wasn’t very well executed. At least give me the option of using a gamepad to steer since I have to be holding one anyway to thrust. (I’ll bump your score .5 if you do) There isn’t even a button to fire your weapons. You must steer to line-up your ship perfectly with the approaching enemy to auto-fire. You can likely finish the entire game in less than three hours, but each mission does have three possible gold medallion rewards and earning all three can be challenging for those who obsess over perfection.
Admittedly, there is a bit of an adrenaline rush the first few times you play The Collider 2 using the Oculus Rift, but the 3D effect and the linear nature of traveling down the same tube time and time again wears thin (even in VR) before you’ll ever reach the second page of missions. It’s a tough recommendation even at $10, but put this on your Wish List and wait for a Steam sale if you are really curious. Otherwise, true space jockeys will find EVE Valkyrie a much more engaging experience.
