Review: Shadow of the Colossus HD

Shadow of the Colossus starts off slow, introducing you into the vast and grand world that the developers lovingly crafted. The concept of the game is simple enough, track down and kill sixteen massive creatures with different strategies to resurrect the women you love. The little story is told in just three cutscenes; one at the beginning, one near the end and the last and most revealing one after the final colossus has been slain. But the story is not what is important, it's the journey travelled that tells the true tale. Even without current generation graphics Shadow of the Colossus manages to be a gorgeous game; though you can tell that this is a PS2 game remade for the PS3.

This is one of the bigger colossus but it shows the scale of this game.

At the beginning of the game you  start off at a nexus area from which you leave to fight each colossus in turn and are returned to after each fight. To find the next colossus you use your sword to highlight which direction to go but then some small amounts of exploration are required to find the correct path to the next fight. To aid you in your travels you have your faithful stallion, Agro, which speeds up your travel greatly. In between fights the tone is very bleak, this is conveyed through there being no music and the only sound being the whistling of the wind and character noises. To add in the oppressive atmosphere you traverse large empty lands and the ruins of long forgotten civilisations meeting no one.

Vast empty environments set the tone for the game.

All the fights follow the same structure, find how to jump aboard the colossus then find a weak point and exploit it. This may sound simple but it's because the developers have worked off this simple idea that this game works so well. You always know what you vaguely have to do but from that you have to analyse the environment and the colossus itself to work out what to do. Add to that different environment types such as lakes and deserts and you get a diverse range of possibilities. It wasn't until the fifth boss that I was truly speechless. It's a flying colossus that you have to jump on as it flies by, whilst it is still flying you have to climb over it and find it's weak points. It wasn't until the eighth boss that I felt challenged as it's electric projectiles kill you very quickly. But then the real challenge is working out how to kill each colossus not actually doing it, that's the fun part.

This game is breath taking as you walk across this flying behemoth.

The game does have a few fault which keep it from achieving perfection. My main problem was with the controls, I had to invert both the horizontal and vertical cameras for the controls to feel natural. The horse controls also annoyed me as they can be quite twitchy and send you veering sideways and that can break your momentum.Also as the game is so directionless if you get stuck you are pretty much on your own to find the solution. 

Some of the colossus designs are obviously influenced by animals.

Final Thoughts

Having never played the original I thought I would either love or hate this game and thankfully I loved it. I was surprised at the originality of each of the colossus in both appearance and strategy. Though by the end I did think that there were too many bipedal colossus and a few strategies were reused or were at least similar. Shadow of the Colossus shows how boss battles should be done, not just once but sixteen times; other developers should take note. 

For it's loving attention to detail, oppressive atmosphere and thrilling boss fights I'm giving Shadow of the Colossus:

9/10

Initial Impressions of Playing Terran

The first thing I noticed about playing Terran was how great it was to have marines; there are few problems in the early game that can't be dealt with with more marines. Early game Zerg and some Protoss armies struggle with anti air but marines counter most early air pressure. Even in the late game marines are an integral part of the Terren army with high DPS when stimmed. In my opinion there is nothing else like the siege tank, which is available rather early on, for locking down an area and making it inaccessible to your opponent. Moving forwards your siege tank lines when you expand means that even if you do lose your expansion the attacker will pay dearly. With the addition of bunkers Terrans can lock down land like no other race can.

Bunkers and siege tanks locking down an expansion.

MULES can be a life saver when your economy has been destroyed and you need to produce enough units just to survive. In my opinion the advantage of MULES is much greater than the early game economic advantage the other two races enjoy. Another unit I found glorious was the blue flame hellion, I wish that I could have used them before the recent patch to nerf the blue flame hellion buff. It was amazing to see how much fear hellions caused in people, even if no kills are made every worker is pulled off the line so mining time is reduced.

A single Hellion takes all of the workers off of the line.

Multi pronged drops weren't as easy to pull off as I was expecting, it takes a lot of micro to ensure that you get at least some  kills. However considering how effective they can be it's worth doing. I noticed that the longer my games the worse my macro became and the larger the pool of excess minerals I had.  In the future I think that I need to build more production facilities, especially when I expand. However the ability to queue up units at buildings means that Terrans can burn through a lot of credits quickly. Also building queues alleviate some of the macro the other races have as you don't have to worry about warp ins or using all your larva. If all else fails you can just make mass marines.

A drop at the expansion after a drop at the main kills all probes.

I'm looking forwards to playing against a Zerg in the future as I didn't get a chance to in my placement matches. I would also like to try out some of the other units I haven't used yet such as the ghost which I plan on exploiting as much as I can against Protoss and maybe in late game Zerg if required. Lastly I'm looking forwards to try playing against platinum players as I'm sure they will have some interesting strategies and this is the highest league I have been in, so it should be a challenge.

Final Thoughts
Having played the other races quite extensively I find Terran to be the most balanced race overall. Their early game units can be used throughout the game for harassing or as the backbone of late game armies. I found it easier to expand as a Zerg because they have map control however expanding as a Terran is less stressful as you can fortify positions heavily, or fly away if that fails. Also most Terran builds unlock the majority of units whereas Protoss is likely to either go robotics or air and Zerg normally don't build all tech structures. Soon I will be trying out crazy strategies in the middle leagues.