GAME REVIEW: Cobalt Core (2023)
Deck-builders done right!
A few weeks ago, my partner came up to me with puppy eyes and asked if we could get a new game for the Nintendo Switch called Cobalt Core, which I assume he had read good things about in Pelit Magazine (a Finnish video game magazine that does honest (/unpaid) reviews) and wanted to try it out. So we immediately got it and I watched him sink so deeply into the game that I became, myself, quite fascinated. Sometimes this happens and I can’t keep up, but in this case, I decided to try it out and see if I liked it as well. The game is fairly new, having been released last year and I recognized their publisher, Brace Yourself Games for Crypt of the Necrodancer, though not the makers, Rocket Rat Games.
Up front, Cobalt Core is a deck-building rogue-lite tactical card game, set in a sci-fi space time loop after an accident has happened on a space station. The main characters, Dizzy, Riggs, and Hyperia (Peri for short) find themselves trapped in said time loop, fighting their way past space pirates and time shards, to reach the titular Cobalt, a ship made up of the aforementioned time crystals. This creates a wonderful story, where each unsuccessful run is a failed attempt to leave the time loop. Every success gives a chance to regain some memories of the time that led up to this cataclysm, with three per character (minus your mage—no spoilers). Alongside your main three characters, you also have three other characters, the mage, and the secret final character to play with, who each have their own deck of cards to gain moves from. Swapping out these characters allows for many different play styles and optimizations to be tried and tested. As you progress, there are also different space ships you can use, and significantly tricker difficulty settings to challenge you even further.
First of all, let’s talk tactics, and I need to give you a little backstory so that you understand the depth of this game’s impact. To use a favorite of my dad’s phrases, you could chase me with a tactical game. Be it Final Fantasy Tactics, Chroma Squad, you name it, if it involves long-form thought processes, that’s not why I’m here and I’m not going to have the patience for it. I am, indeed, a legendarily impatient gamer, much to my detriment. We have an in-house joke, from some years back when I was swearing away at a video game and my partner asked, “Why don’t you slow down and take your finger off the sprint button?” and I gave him a confused look and jokingly replied, “The play button? The one that makes the game work? Why would I do that?” Ever since, we have referred to my particular style of gaming as “play button gaming,” and it’s true I would rather sprint and fail 9 times and succeed on the 10th than slow down and get it right on the first try. Don’t ask me why I’m like that, it’s just how I play video games and it’s exactly the reason why I couldn’t play Grim Fandango, because the character moved so slowly that it made exploration (a necessary part of the game) impossible for me due to how tedious it was (I mean, come on though, it took like a friggin’ full minute to cross a screen in that game, it was torture).
So you have to understand how absolutely and uttering impressed that I am that Cobalt Core got me to slow down and think. It really got to the point where I had to almost hold myself hostage, in a sense. I was, once again, swearing away, but it wasn’t at the game this time… it was at myself, because I wasn’t being smart. When my hand for the round would show up, I would immediately press the first card I read if it seemed good, without any regard for where I was, how many shields I had, where my enemy was, was it shooting at me… there are a lot of things you can pay attention to in this game and I very quickly realized that if I didn’t slow down and start paying attention to them, I was never going to get anywhere. Now, as I said, most of the time, this is where I yawn, declare utmost boredom, and never pick up the game again. However, I felt like I was deprived of something… there were some really fucking cool moves to me made in this game… card combos to be stacked and optimized… and I was missing out! Seriously, I was, in my mind, holding myself up by the collar of my shirt and pointing at the Switch, saying, “Listen, you don’t get to touch the A button [which confirms a choice] until you’ve looked at the whole screen. Twice!” So… I actually forced myself to slow down and learn a bit of patience… for the first time after about 30 years of gaming.
Oh, how I was rewarded! It was everything I had hoped for… can you imagine my delight when I figured out that I could pack my deck with cards and then draw as many of them as possible, to unleash a Hand Canon, which deals damage based on how many cards you have in your hand? Oh my gawd it’s so much fun! I could go on and on about it, but really, all I’d be doing is spoiling the game for you.
Now, to get some fast facts out of the way as well, the art and music are spectacular. Oh sure, I might have made the pixel sprites a little simpler or I could find some flimsy ways it could’ve been improved, but overall, I just have no complaints. I love the color schemes, I love the artwork, I love the characters… it’s all great. The music has a special sort of magic too, as it’s really understated and suits the atmosphere, but doesn’t distract your attention away from the game. That said, there were a lot of mornings when I woke up and had the game’s music playing softly in my head, which—you guessed it—made me want to play more, of course.
The story was awesome too! No-spoilers yet, the game is a rogue-lite, but they did a good job of adding a story to it, much like Hades. The resetting after death makes perfect sense because it’s set in a time-loop, where the characters are guided by their (corrupted?) computer AI, CAT.exe, who exists outside the time loop and passes on the warning that they must find a way out or perish. Every victory gives a memory from one of the characters that was in your party, up to three. This means there are twelve stories to hear from the main characters about what happened on the space station that led to the creation of the time loop and the game encourages you to using all of them to get the full story. Every one of the main six (out of eight) characters plays a role in the accident, to varying degrees of guilt.
The characters themselves are so much fun: Dizzy is the science officer who loves experiments and isn’t always very safe about them; Riggs is the silly pilot who is suspiciously enthusiastic about guns; Peri is the chief security/weapons officer (gosh, I feel like there was some Star Trek: Deep Space 9 in someone’s coffee when writing this game, wouldn’t you say?) who tries to keep the others from killing themselves and/or destroying the station; Isaac is the drone specialist/chief engineer and works under Dizzy, sweet and naïve and more level-headed than his superior; Drake, a narcissistic pirate/smuggler/hired mercenary; and Max, the hacker who develops the AI for the ship.
Spoiler Zone
Every one of the above characters was acquainted with or worked with the others. All of the above, minus Drake, were staff on the space station that was built around a massive glowing blue crystal that was found in space. Peri’s hands are largely clean in the whole thing, with her backstory mostly showing how and why she is so diligent at her job (the flashback to her childhood was astounding, in a way that’s simultaneously hilarious and awful). Attempting to learn about the core, Dizzy conducts experiments, often under the watchful eyes of Isaac or Peri, and concludes that it could potentially be some sort of egg that is trying to communicate. When Max arrives, he talks about the AI he’s working on called CAT, which isn’t up to snuff at first. Meanwhile, mercenary pilot Drake hears about something potentially lucrative out where the space station is and convinces her insider contact, the new pilot, Riggs—with extremely little difficulty—to come back for “one last job.” This all culminates when Max and Dizzy decide to plug CAT into the core (during a time it would normally be shut off) and this is unfortunately the same time that Riggs goes to chip a little piece off the crystal to sell… this causes the explosion that created the time loop.
It is then revealed that the seemingly corrupted AI, CAT, who has been guiding you through the time loop, is actually the creature that was inside the crystal/egg using the AI to communicate and the characters were its first contact with life after hatching and it considers you all friends. The game then ends with the final escape to break free of the time loop, led by CAT, one-by-one freeing the characters, even Evil Riggs (the Stage 2 boss, who is a time-split version of Riggs), and breaking free as CAT thanks them for their friendship and says goodbye.
There are also two more characters to be unlocked: Books, a space mage who is really cute and seems to be hanging around just because, and once you’ve unlocked the full ending, CAT is revealed as another playable character, who draws cards from other characters’ decks, allowing for more complicated combos.
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So, regardless of whether you pay attention to the story, this game is nevertheless extremely fun and rewarding. While I personally didn’t enjoy playing with Max, that’s a stylistic issue, as I found him to be more complicated to use than the others. That’s definitely a personal issue and not a problem with gameplay balance, though I do find him less fun than the rest, being a support character who often needs two of his cards to show up in your hand at the same time for them to be worthwhile, and some of them are useless if you have magnetized cards (ones that don’t go away after a shuffle). There are also little pitfalls you can fall into if you’re not careful with your choices, but again, that ultimately tends to happen because the player wasn’t careful.
On the whole, I really can’t find much to complain about with this game. Of course some characters are going to be more fun to play than others, that’s just normal, and beyond that, I’ve heard there are some complaints about a lack of diversity in the battles, which I suppose is true if you’re nit-picking, but personally I didn’t have a problem with this. What was even more fun was to sit down with my partner, who loves tactical games, and have him teach me how to put some of these cards to proper use. There were some that I simply wouldn’t touch because I didn’t get how to optimize them, but he taught me how many of them work and gave me a lot of insights into some cool stuff I could do. Though it’s not a 2-player game, I had fun playing with him and he enjoys watching me learn, so there was a nice symbiosis between us when playing. Even though I’ve finished the game and am not playing as much anymore, it’s still fun to throw on if I need to kill an hour or so, while my partner is still playing quite regularly because he’s much more inclined to play around with new tricks and styles.
Ultimately, I think this was a nigh-flawless game and I am thrilled to hear that it’s getting a lot of support—this means that the developers are going to keep expanding it, much like with Dead Cells, so I genuinely am looking forward to whatever they decide to add to it in the future!
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