Game: Red Colony 2
Developer: RunicCodes
Publisher: Shinyuden
Platforms: Windows PC, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: July 15, 2021

Survival horror games featuring zombies are nothing new; in fact, they are probably one of the most overplayed scenarios in all of gaming. They’ve overrun cities, islands, and even World War II battlefields. Red Colony 2 attempts to up the ante by putting the player on a besieged colony on Mars… along with ravenous dinosaurs. Also you’re an anime girl with huge boobs.

If the above description turns you off, then Red Colony 2 isn’t for you. Still interested? Read on.

Red Colony 2 is an over-the-top, 2D ecchi horror drama by lone developer Rune Shimotsuji Storm. For the uninitiated, the ecchi genre is known for exploiting sexual themes and images to heighten the absurdity of an otherwise normal plot. It is a form of parody, in which playful sex themes are dialed all the way up to 11. In the case for Red Colony 2, the already crazy scenario of a Martian colony overrun with both zombies and dinosaurs is made even more wacky by having all the female characters (there are several) have ridiculous sized boobs, dressed in next to nothing, and the zombies both humping and groping you when they go in for a bite.

I’ll be upfront in that I don’t normally go for this sort of game, and I’m normally critical of how blantantly sexualized women are in Japanese media, in particular video games. I can also understand the appeal of this sort of game; not only does sex sell, but this kind of absurdity adds a dash of humor that horror games sometimes need.

The original Red Colony, which released earlier this year on Steam and Nintendo Switch, stars a woman named Maria searching for her daughter after a virus is unleashed on the Martian colony she lives in, turning its victims into the flesh eating undead.

Red Colony 2 picks up immediately where the last game left off, with players assuming the role of Nichole, a prostitute whose son is in prison for murder and her daughter has been kidnapped from the government; on top of that, the same virus seems to have made its way to her own Martian colony (the “Blue” colony) along with various prehistoric terrors.

You don’t have to have played the original game to understand what is going on in the sequel (I didn’t), but I will say the plot is far more complicated than I expected given the initial setup. The game could just be about a hooker fighting off zombies and dinos on Mars, but it’s fairly convoluted the deeper you get into the story. While I appreciated the attempt to craft a more cohesive story, and some of the twists certainly did make the adventure somewhat more enjoyable, a more dumbed down story may have been more appropriate here as I don’t think it’s audience is going in looking for anything too complex.

I will say that for an ecchi title, I was expecting the game to be… sexier? There’s no nudity, and aside from how the women are dressed, the game is rather tame. I thought that this would be an experience that I would need to take a shower after playing, but I’ve seen much worse on cable television.

Being cast as a prostitute could have been exploited in any many of ways, but the developer uses this to their advantage to enhance the story. Yeah, it can be a bit scummy, and yes, this game doesn’t handle the serious issues of sex work with any kind of, well, seriousness, but at least they don’t have you entertaining “Johns” in the middle of all this chaos. It’s an interested route to go that I don’t think enough games have the balls to do.

Many gamers will be drawn to the game by its detailed, anime art style. Admittedly, the artwork, when standing still, isn’t so bad; there are nice uses of color, and most environments are nicely designed. I would say that there isn’t enough detail on most of the human characters, as they seem just a tad too plain given the adult nature of the title. Still, that could be part of the appeal for fans of this genre. I’m not entirely sure.

What I can say with certainty is that when in motion, the animation can be quite dreadful. There’s little to no transition to some movements, such as crouching, running, climbing, or in the zombies’ case, dying. Sometimes when you kill an enemy they just drop like a loaded sack of potatoes in the span of about 1 frame.

There’s also a good deal of glitches that I encountered in this short adventure. Nothing was game breaking, but at least half-a-dozen times I attempted to go through a door or up some stairs, and after watching the transition animation, I reappeared at the same screen. Even more troubling is that I killed a zombie at the last second, and he still bit me even though he was laying dead on the ground. There was nothing to do but watch Nichole struggle with an invisible enemy before breaking away, and that’s annoying.

Combat is equally as clunky. You do battle with zombies with the aid of melee weapons and three available firearms: a handgun, shotgun, and rifle. Unlike the original game, in which you have a Bowie knife that can always help you when you’re in a pinch, the melee weapons in Red Colony 2 always break after three direct hits. Firearms are difficult to aim, and feel just like they did in Resident Evil… in the nineties. I would have enjoyed an easier system for aiming your guns, as ammunition is scarce and expensive, thus there’s very little room for error.

There are some light stealth sections that help alleviate the stress of combat. There is a part where you can shoot out a light so a zombie cannot see you, and a few areas where you may crawl under desks to avoid the undead hoard, but these all seem relatively scripted, which tends to ruin the excitement of these stealth areas.

Dinosaurs do offer a nice alternative to the zombie slaying, and the Jurassic beasts are involved in the most intense sequences in the game. You cannot defend yourself against them, and should you not escape quick enough they will butcher you in a single deadly swipe. Running from these prehistoric creatures through a tight corridor can really get the blood pumping.

Most of your gear you’ll be crafting from a 3D printing machine, and while it’s a cool idea, it’s not taken far enough. You need to collect a certain number of blueprints and ink colors if you want to craft an item, and with this setup there’s the potential for some strategy in the game, forcing you to decide if you want to print out health packs or ammo. As it is however, it’s not very different from any other kind of store in a game, just that the currency is ink and not coins, which is a shame.

You can’t have a survival horror game without puzzles it seems, and while Red Colony 2 is riddled with… riddles… they could be a bit more inventive. In the beginning, I was stuck for several minutes, unable to get through a locked door, and kept wandering around searching for what I had missed. I then realized that the answer I sought lay vaguely in the background. This is a recurring theme: find a keypad, notice that a certain number of lights are turned on in the background or something similar, and that be your answer. When solutions aren’t expressed in odd ways, they are flatly told to you outright, written on a piece of paper conveniently near where a locked door or safe rests, or hidden within a long conversation with one of the game’s numerous NPCs. To put it bluntly, the puzzles aren’t a challenge, and that’s a bummer.

Red Colony 2 surprisingly has voice acting, and while it seems at the least passable, it’s all in Japanese so I can’t really tell. I know this game is developed by a Japanese developer, and the game being ecchi it certainly is Japanese, but it’s still a little distracting as both the environments and characters don’t scream Japanese to me. It’s kind of like if everyone in the Resident Evil games spoke fluent Japanese even in the US release.

Verdict: 2 / 5 Stars

Overall, your mileage may vary with this title. The experience is very short at about 2 hours, though it does have some optional items to find, areas to explore, and more than one ending, so replay value is there. Priced at $6.99 USD, the clumsy nature of this game will disappoint more than it will entertain. It feels much more like a budget title that you’ll snag for a few bucks, and as such I felt that the game was short on content for the price. Still, I admire the amount of work accomplished by a single designer in the span of six months. That in and of itself merits praise.