Colorz (Wii) Review

Taking control of alien spacecraft, your aim is to get to a landing platform at the end of each stage by floating through the worlds avoiding circular enemies that can act as walls as well as flying about. Taking inspiration from games like Ikaruga, you can alter your ship's colour by flying through warps that repaint you and to defend yourself you absorb any enemies that match your current hue. This starts off basically enough - you could be red and there might be just red and blue circles about, so naturally all you have to do is gobble up the red and dodge the blue. Points are gained the more you destroy, and the longer you keep a combo up by besting enemies in rapid succession. They're also earned by being a daredevil and playing chicken with the enemy, brushing up against colours that can harm you so that sparks fly off ('scratching', the game calls it). Take it a millimetre too far, though, and away goes one of your lives.

The complexity begins after this. Soon you are asked to control up to three craft simultaneously and must mix the ships' colours to get through blockages. For example, purple enemies will appear, so temporarily weld red and blue fellows together red and blue. Unfortunately, the control of multiple ships probably gives peoples' brains too much credit - only with time, dedication and an inherent ability to multitask to extreme levels is somebody going to be good at the single player mode of Colorz. Your default ship is controlled by the Wii remote pointer; it'll trail around after it with a small delay. The next ship you are given is controlled with the analogue stick. Things are difficult now, as it's tough to focus on the two different characters floating around and separating their movement onto the two different controls, but it's doable with some effort and if you try to take things slow. It reaches the level of impossibility with the addition of the third and final ship, which is mapped to the d-pad. If following two ships was learning algebra for the first time, three ships is quantum physics - show me somebody that can competently, consistently move a trio of characters in multiple directions, destroying enemies and avoiding losing lives (shared over all ships) while using three different input methods and I will happily shake his hand and weep at my ineptitude. It might have worked if the inputs were similar; the two analogues and the d-pad on the classic controller, for example.

While a great concept, it just doesn't work for single player once you have progressed beyond the second world; it's too much to process. The saving grace is the multiplayer, which is for up to three people using remotes, each in separate command of one of the ships, which works far better. The core gameplay remains, but rather than struggling with the gaming equivalent of patting your head, rubbing your tummy and doing a jig simultaneously each person just looks after their own craft and a co-op dynamic is added, as you're having to constantly communicate to decide when to merge, who is going to go for the extra lives, and to tell each other to clear paths for each other. It's still difficult, what with the need to coordinate effectively, the screen speeding up and slowing down, the overflow of different colours - but it's the right level of challenge. This is where the fun in Colorz really is, and if you want to avoid frustration it's probably the one and only way you should play it right from the start.