COLLAPSED Review for Nintendo Switch

Recently, I got the chance to play Collapsed, a roguelite from developer Glaive Games and publishers OverGamez and Glaive Games. The main idea of the game is to hack and blast your way as far as possible through a series of levels and bosses while collecting items and currency for skill upgrades along the way. Technically, the game has a story, and the fragmented storytelling through Memory Nodes you find in levels is a cool concept, but it makes the plot hard to track. The gist is this: you’re in a world in which robots were initially used to enhance the life of the people inhabiting it, but for some reason, the robots stopped taking orders and started rampaging. Your job is to cut through the hordes of enemies, defeat the bosses, and continue putting the puzzle pieces together.

I want to start by saying I really enjoy the aesthetics of the game. The art style isn’t too complex, but the color schemes, the enemy design, and the level design are all awesome. I also liked the boss fights. They were challenging and had diverse ways of attacking, and having to open the portal to unleash them built suspense and nerves.

I’m a big fan of roguelikes and roguelites in general, and the basic mechanics of the gameplay in Collapsed were no exception. I loved that you had a choice between different base builds when you start a file, how many skills you could unlock on the skill tree, and the fast-paced playstyle of the enemy-laden, procedurally-generated levels. Also, this may seem like a relatively small detail, but being able to bring up a rough map of each level was so nice. If I ever wondered for a second where I hadn’t explored, the map made it very clear, and after playing some games that fell short in that regard, I was very appreciative.

The thing I found most frustrating about Collapsed by far was falling through the map. I fell out of the world on four separate occasions (naturally, it only happened after I had made a decent amount of progress). Once, I landed on some kind of subfloor frustratingly close to the level and spent about 5 minutes trying to glitch my way back in, but all my dashing, jumping, attacking, and walking had no effect. Another time, I had the same situation where I beat a boss, entered a new level, and glitched through the floor, but this time I was forever falling through the void, again with no way to recover. The last two times it happened, I was walking normally through a level and once more found myself slipping straight down into the abyss. This game-breaking bug was really frustrating, especially when the staple of this genre is to completely reset your progress (minus your items collected and skills unlocked in previous runs) when you close and reopen the game, which is what I was forced to do. To put it politely, it frustrated me enough that I said some very unkind words, then had to put the game down and walk away each time.

I do take issue with a couple other aspects of Collapsed. For one, I found it a little too grindy. When I first picked it up, I had a lot of fun figuring out the mechanics and throwing myself at levels over and over until I started to get a feel for the gameplay. However, after dying to the second or third boss (or the subsequent levels) for the third or fourth time, I didn’t have much desire to keep grinding for money and items to better prepare myself. While the initial upgrades weren’t too pricey, the cost of later skills looked like it increased exponentially compared to the money yielded from gameplay.

I also really enjoy the roguelike style of loot drops and customization, but the game throws too much loot at you too fast. Your inventory is always full, and you don’t figure out what’s worth keeping until you’ve already filled the relatively small storage in your base (and trust me, that thing is a real pain to clear out — you have to put the items in your inventory, drop them one at a time from there, and repeat). I eventually got to a point where I wouldn’t really pay much attention to drops because I didn’t want to deal with combing through my inventory to try and make space to pick them up.

My last small frustration is that every once in a while, you could end up in a room with so many enemies and projectiles that the game would lag, making it nearly impossible to avoid taking damage. I know the Switch has limited hardware, but it would have been nice if Glaive found some kind of workaround.

All this is certainly not to say that Collapsed is a bad game. I had fun with it, particularly for the first few hours I played it (and before I discovered that rage-inducing bug). I really enjoyed the aesthetics of the game, the roguelite style, and the fast-paced gameplay, and if it just had a few of the issues I talked about above, I would almost certainly rate it higher, but unfortunately, repeatedly running into a game-breaking bug forced me to lower its rating.

Review: 7/10

Check Out the Collapsed Trailer:

You can pre-purchase Collapsed right now via the Nintendo eShop on sale for $12.75. The game will launch tomorrow, August 29, 2020.

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