As I was first playing COLLAPSED, I was struck by the possibility of creating an extra-powerful character similar to the ones you see on its Steam page, with projectiles bouncing every which way and enemies appearing powerless against the onslaught. Granted, this is a difficult roguelite in which it’s easy to die, but the appeal of games that offer a high level of customization is min-maxing a build so statistically overpowered that it carves through that difficulty with relative ease. Several hours in, however, my build was nowhere close to that, as I hadn’t earned enough money to unlock many nodes in COLLAPSED‘s upgrade tree. Few nodes translates to few upgrades, and even the dropped equipment required to create one of those flashy builds has to first be unlocked. As a result, I spent a solid 6 or so hours upgrading the damage of my weapon rather than being able to create multiple projectiles and inflict status effects. That was still enough to finish the game and reach the credits, but doing so unlocks a harder difficulty that you can select, and I wanted to figure out how much content is here. Sadly, I still couldn’t afford the meaningful upgrades that’d allow me to better tackle the harder difficulty despite having just completed a run. COLLAPSED seems like a game that should be defined by its abundant character customization possibilities, but more often than not, it ends up being defined by its padding and unexpected limitations.

COLLAPSED‘s grinding is overwhelmingly time-consuming and prevalent

Normally, this is where I’d talk about COLLAPSED‘s story, but it’s so entirely at odds with the rest of the game that it’s hard to make heads or tails of what’s happening. The basic gameplay revolves around entering a procedurally generated level filled with 3-5 portals, with only one leading to the next procedurally generated level, and a run through COLLAPSED consists of 6 of these levels and 4 bosses. Dying at any point sends you back to the beginning, though, so you’re incentivized to enter portals immediately even if you haven’t fully explored an area. COLLAPSED‘s story is told through “Memory Nodes” that you can interact with during levels for a short text-only blurb. There seems to be only one of these per level, so it’s easy to find the portal forward early and completely miss out on details relevant to the area and/or setting and/or your character. That’s assuming that the information is relevant, of course—there’s a lot of random babbling between the important bits, and since you’re frequently missing Memory Nodes, you’re bound to read them out of order. This storytelling method is so scattered that the story becomes borderline incoherent.

That underlying sense that everything is in constant conflict is pervasive, too, extending well into the gameplay. For one thing, this is a loot-based game that forces you to dump an equipped item into your inventory to replace it with something else. Not only does this make it difficult to A/B different upgrades, but it also means that having a full inventory makes it impossible to swap in new equipment until you drop something. Your inventory is small and loot drops constantly, so you’ll be facing this problem more often than you think. You’ll eventually learn which loot can be safely ignored (though not before cluttering the storage chest you have access to between runs), fortunately, which usually translates to loot that doesn’t have passive bonuses attached. Plain equipment is useless compared to stuff that can provide you with bonuses to damage, armor, health, and other stats.

Even if a piece of loot seems useless, it’s worth picking up if it has a good passive bonus because these bonuses apply to your entire build rather than just the attack method in question; a melee item designed to buff your damage if you kill an enemy only appears to apply if you use a melee attack for the killing blow, but I was able to use passive bonuses on melee weapons to increase my ranged damage to absurd levels. You have three options for changing these bonuses: grinding through levels until you find what you’re looking for, using a crafting station to destroy items and create a specific one of a similar rarity with a random bonus that might be what you’re looking for, or find the other crafting station that allows you to spend COLLAPSED‘s three currencies to randomize your bonus. In practice, all three options are incredibly unreliable and grindy.

Seriously—everything you need in COLLAPSED requires tons of grinding

There’s so much loot of varying rarities and passive bonuses that stumbling upon the specific thing you’re looking for could take a dozen hours of repeating the same handful of stages (which is to say that COLLAPSED‘s procedural generation largely feels like its areas are simply being arranged in slightly different ways rather than being significantly different). There are no crafting stations in the hub area you visit between runs for reasons that boggle the mind, so you have to scour stages for one of them whenever you need to change a bonus or craft something new, and they don’t spawn reliably. Many stages don’t have one of these upgrade stations at all, and like Memory Nodes, you’re likely to leave via portal before finding others that are there. You shouldn’t have to go out of your way to spend money or items in a game that’s ostensibly about that kind of thing.

Spending money is already a huge ask considering how much of it you’re expected to obtain and spend in this game. I mentioned it at the beginning of this review, but COLLAPSED has an upgrade tree filled with nodes that have to be unlocked with money, and the sums are utterly ridiculous. After completing the game for the first time, it took me about 30-45 minutes to complete it again, which would earn around 7,000 units of the main currency and a small amount of the others. Many nodes cost 4,000-8,000 and have multiple upgrade tiers that cost the same amount, and that’s for a single node of dozens. And you can only equip 4 of these upgrades onto your character at first, with there being 4 more upgrade slots that you have to purchase, and only once you’ve made your way to them on the upgrade tree by buying everything in your way.

Given how slowly I was filling out the tree and how limited my build was despite having beaten the game on the first difficulty, it became apparent that I’d need to spend a solid 10-20 hours grinding for just the things I need, and that’s not remotely okay. This is the point where I fired up Cheat Engine, hacked in a ton of money, and unlocked every single node. COLLAPSED didn’t magically stop being grindy, but there were suddenly glimmers of fun highlighting the game that it could have been. Different play styles instantly became viable, and while it was still a bore having to run through levels looking for upgrade stations that might not even exist, my character became so powerful that I managed to complete the second and third difficulty, and nearly complete the fourth.

Ignoring enemies save for those required to activate portals can be entertaining, and the ways that the later difficulties complicate things are also fun. I especially appreciated how harder areas would spawn combinations of hazards, once placing poisonous gas bubbles and red balls of patrolling electricity next to a portal. Bosses being given magical shields that force you to stay close to them while they create fuzzy spots of area-of-effect damage that it’s hard to keep track of was my breaking point, though, and giving enemies more bullets and normal damage resistance highlighted the fact that lots of enemies coming at you at once makes it difficult to read attack cues. Still, I enjoyed the second and third difficulty levels, even if it quickly became obvious that harder takes on the same short, repetitive gameplay loop were all COLLAPSED was ever going to be.

You get equippable powers, but the cooldowns are simply too long

Bosses always drop at least one power, and you can equip two of these onto your character and activate them with RB/LB or R1/L1 (side note: I appreciate the Xbox and Playstation controller compatibility). I don’t know the keyboard and mouse equivalents because I prefer controller aiming for games like this. Anyway, cooldowns are often 20 seconds or longer, and boss attacks are difficult enough to dodge that you’ll ideally complete the fight within a similar amount of time. Effectively, I was able to use my bullet-destroying power once per boss fight, and another power that dropped exploding healing crystals every so often during normal levels, but largely forgot that these powers were a thing because of the excessive cooldowns. There isn’t a huge variety of power types, either, and the ones I obtained on the initial difficulty were somehow more powerful than what I was finding on the fourth difficulty setting despite the average rarity of every other piece of equipment going up. It’s very strange.

COLLAPSED‘s visuals and music have unexpected amounts of personality

Visually, COLLAPSED‘s levels are more varied than you’d think. I nevertheless found myself wishing for more levels, but the ones that are here all look distinct from each other while still being a believable habitat for many of the same monstrous creatures found in other levels. The only thing I can really hold against it is the aforementioned readability issues when dealing with lots of bullets and enemies standing in the same spot. That becomes increasingly prevalent as harder difficulties increase the number of projectiles and enemies. Musically, I wasn’t blown away by the stage or boss music. I’m not sure if all stages play the same song or if they’re just one-note, but there’s at least some added instrumentation during boss fights that help to differentiate them. The menu and hub area music, on the other hand, are stunning. One is a soft track that relies on the efforts of a reverb-drenched piano and some subtle backing instrumentation, while the other builds to an epic, synth-fueled crescendo. Pure quality.

Story: 1/3 Gameplay: 1.5/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ – 5/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

COLLAPSED Review Screenshots

*A Steam key was provided for the purpose of this COLLAPSED review

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