The best puzzle games start out with a simple premise that gets more complex and challenging as time goes on. Collision Courses starts out with a simple premise, but while it remains challenging, it never really progresses to the point of being especially fun.
Collision Courses presents the player with several rockets that are floating on the screen in specific places. By touching a rocket, you can rotate it to face one of four directions, and when you hit the start button, the rocket will fly in a straight line in whichever direction it’s facing. The idea is to make sure all the rockets crash into one another to solve the puzzle.
As the puzzles get more difficult, you’ll find more rockets that seem to be arranged randomly, but really exist in specific pairs. The trick is to look for rockets that seem to be the right distance from one another, at right angles or in a line, that will impact each other rather than flying by. However, you only have a few seconds to make any adjustments to the rockets and start the process, or you fail the test.
This is where Collision Courses actually started to lose me. For some reason, having only about 20 seconds to evaluate the collision puzzles made them less interesting. In order to see if a solution is successful, you just have to hit the button and run it. If not, start over. It’s this forced trial and error that takes a lot of the fun out of the game.
Without those “hmm” moments in which you can stare at a puzzle and try to work it out mentally, Collision Courses feels like it’s missing something.
