Fruit Ninja developer will destroy the world through color with Colossatron: Massive World Threat

Halfbrick announced its next game at PAX Australia over the weekend, Colossatron: Massive World Threat, an action mobile game that draws inspiration from anime, games and cartoons of the '80s. We got some hands-on time with Colossatron: Massive World Threat on iPad at the gaming expo.

Colossatron thrusts players in the role of a pissed-off giant robotic snake called Colossatron, which has crash-landed on Earth. The aim is to decimate the planet, while building the Colossatron with red, blue and yellow-colored weapons and power-ups called Powernodes. These can be combined to create stronger Power node tiers.

The Powernodes are picked up through the environment and placed on Colossatron using a drag-and-drop motion. This is easy to manage in the early stages on the game, but as more enemies appear on screen, it becomes a mad scramble to swap out nodes, integrate new ones, all while strategizing.

Red and yellow-colored nodes "tend to be" laser weapons, a spokesperson told us, while green ones have "interesting properties" including heals.

Combining similarly colored nodes gives you upgrades and creates new weapons. "It is part color-matching game," said the studio spokesperson.

The nodes fire on buildings and hostiles automatically, but the Focus Fire allows the player to target where the volleys are going, which are useful for boss fights. The Focus Fire has a cool down of about five seconds. There are also different power ups throughout the game, such as shields or a mega bomb which will wipe out everything on the screen.

A Halfbrick spokersperson told Polygon that it isn't revealing minute details about weapon combinations yet and there are some combinations that it is leaving up to the player to discover. Players lose the game once all of Colossatron's nodes are destroyed, however, dead Powernodes can be swapped out and used as bombs against enemies.

As the game progressed, the amount of firepower shown on screen escalated quickly which was entertaining to look at itself, so much so that I was torn from managing nodes to watching the firepower in action. Colossatron is an entrancing game with mechanics perfectly suited for a touchscreen device.

From now until the game's release later this year, the team are working on bolstering Colossatron's mechanics and story. Colossatron is currently running on iPads but price range and other confirmed platforms are unannounced at this stage and will be worked out in the next phase of the game's development. To see the gameplay in action, be sure to watch the trailer in our previous coverage.