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No, Colors of Damnation isn't RACIST, silly, even though in effect its plot is massacring as many people of color as you can because they're a different color than you. I mean, the game is made by a German, what could we possibly have to worry about?

Okay, I'm done with the jokes now. : )

Colors of Damnation is a shmup made in RPG Maker VX Ace. I'm old enough to remember the days when we'd all nod sagely and agree on the conventional wisdom that making a shooter in RPG Maker was impossible! I'm not going to date myself further with the game that blew my mind clear of that misconception, perhaps because I'm too senile to remember its name! Anyway, CoD (hmm...) is not a shining example of the genre, unfortunately.

Story
Ordinarily, I try to divide my reviews evenly up between S.A.S.S. -- or Story, Action, Sights, and Sounds. In this case, I have a feeling that 75% of the text is going to go in the action section with the other 25% split between the other three sections. Colors of Damnation is the classic example of an excuse plot. Some kind of virus...turning people colors...across the galaxy...bounty on them...make some credits...bla bla bla. The main character is named Marco Bronco which sounds suspiciously like an Italian porn star name. Even the characters seem bored or annoyed with the dialogue they're delivering.


Invasion of the color fuckers!

It did not help that this game appears to have been written by someone who is ESL, but I try to make it a point never to take off points for that in and of itself.

By the way, this game is pretty hard. I have more to say on that in the next section. I was not able to clear the fourth stage (not for lack of trying), mainly because those quicksand slowdown traps are fucking bullshit instant death sentences...damnit I'm getting into the next section again. But I have my doubts that even if I had beaten the game if it is ever explained in any way shape or form why the crew of the Centerprise there (that's what the ship is actually called) are so cool riding around in a ship crewed by THREE GIGANTIC ALIENS. My impression is that's just the graphic they had and they went with it.

Action
This is a game about running around shooting color coded RTP soldiers from RM2k with color coded bullets and making them die. Why do only green bullets work on green enemies?


"Because duh!" is the closest thing to an in-game explanation we get.

So how is the gameplay? Not good enough to make me want to keep playing without a better story, unfortunately, which is not to say that it's bad. Here are my issues with it alongside the stuff I like:

• On the receiving end, at least, collision detection is loose and wonky. Plenty of times I was thinking "bullshit! that did NOT hit me!" upon taking a hit, or worse, "huh, did that hit me? no idea". This is probably endemic to the scripts used and pretty hard to fix.
  
  
• Enemies are bullet sponges. You, the player, can take ten hits before you're dead. Each enemy can absorb (I didn't precisely count) around 15-20 bullets of the correct color before they drop (wrong colored bullets do no damage, of course). Odd game balance decision.
  
• On a related note, it'd have been nice to pick up a shotgun or machine gun or something. Mea culpa if these weapons drop later in the game, but they should have dropped earlier in my opinion.
  
• Powerups are kind of a crapshoot. Durations should probably be longer for the useful powerups (+Speed, the one that makes incoming hits refill your health instead). What I initially took to be Time+ powerups were actually time booby traps that cost you time. Why no straight up Health Restore powerup? The tutorial showed a Dynamite icon to avoid because it would blow you up, the Diamond icon that increases your critical chance also blows you up with a fiery explosion. Finally, starting on the desert planet, there are these electricity looking powerups. If you step on one of them, you get slowed to a crawl easily long enough for the enemies to mob you and lunge you to death. They might as well inflict instant death as-is. The freeze powerups were great but never seemed to drop.
  
• Bombs are awesome! They don't fuss about bullet color, begging the in-universe question of why don't we just use bombs on these things in the first place? I'd like if they did a bit more damage, but all in all it was tremendously satisfying picking up a bomb, leading a squad of color goons into it, and having it blow up and inflict splash damage. Easily my favorite part of the game.
  
• If you DO enjoy the gameplay more than I did, there's a survival mode, a "simulator" tutorial that attempts to teach you how to play, and even a level editor!

Protip: If you are subconsciously worried your game might be boring, DO NOT have your in-game characters voice this idea to the player!!!

There was also the occasional programming glitch:

Houston, we has problem.

All in all though, it's evident that a lot of work went into Colors of Damnation even if the end result wasn't the most thrilling or the most even top-down 2D shooter you'll play this year.

Sights
Let me start off with a nitpick here and move onto more serious issues. The cover art shows the main character holding a revolver, which everyone knows can fire shots before it has to reload. The gameplay features the main character using an automatic which can fire infinite shots without reloading.

The environments in the game are fairly graphically impressive by RPG Maker standards, but they do quickly start to feel like pallet swaps of each other. This is more of a gameplay thing, but each arena I saw was just a giant circular bowl with no terrain features to obstruct movement--I'm guessing this is due to the less-than-smart pathfinding capabilities of the enemies, but I'm not sure--and so the levels felt samey. The spaceship was good looking (I'm still wondering about those three alien giants at the controls) and the world map was passable. The animations used in gameplay were fine and the poses of the main sprite were well done. My main issue was with why the enemies were color-coded RTP soldiers. I feel like making them into some kind of alien monsters--ample sprites are available for free online--would have gone a long way towards making this the kind of game it feels like it wants to be. It felt like the color-coded RTP soldiers were kind of a "let's do this instead of actually trying" type thing.

Sounds
Sound design was fairly solid, quite arcadey. The gunfire, the bomb sound effects, the powerup sound effects, etcetera, they all worked even though at least some of them I recognized from the RTP. The music...did not leave much of an impression. There was nothing that made me want to mute the game, but there was nothing that had me grooving to it either.

Final Thoughts
Play Colors of Damnation if and when you want to go to a planet called RAINBOW COLORADO and kill everyone there for being a different color from you!