COBALT CORE

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Yeah, I am late to the party. Such times we are living in! My steak is too juicy, my lobster - too buttery. With the constant deluge of great games coming out every month, it is nigh impossible to try to cover them all. I'd need like 20 writers on staff to even try, and even then I am sure plenty of excellent titles would slip through the nets. Anyway... COBALT CORE! Highly acclaimed, well beloved, if you're a roguelike deckbuilder fan, it is very likely you've at least heard of this game. Pilot a selection of starships through a repeating time loop. Unlock memories of your adorable crewmates and cheeky cat-shaped AI. Cobble together a full story of what the Cobalt is, how every character fits into the creation of the time anomaly. You know what they say: Every Cobalt has its Core.

Seriously, though, we stumble here upon the first great feature of this game - a great reason to keep playing. Even nowadays it is still relatively rare to get a roguelike-structured game that puts some serious elbow grease into making sense of the repeating runs. Usually it is a shelved thing, a brushed off explanation, some tiny morsel of "and then you revive and star over, okay?". HADES by Supergiant Games has already proven to the player that the rogue structure can be a superlative carrier for unfurling a grand narrative. More and more games in this genre try their hand at giving a proper story framework as to why we can keep repeating certain loops over and over again. COBALT CORE might not be as organic as the aforementioned HADES, but it still provides what I would consider a great incentive to keep going. Unlocking memories and seeing how many are still to uncover is a great tangible milestone to reach. Furthermore, the loops change as you play - old bosses get new forms, their dialogues keep progressing, you start meeting new characters. It's pretty darn good at keeping each new run feeling fresh, at least a little bit. So, kudos for that!

Each combat encounter, each draw of cards is a tactical puzzle of resource managment, smart positioning and preparing for the coming turns.

There's a lot of charm here, too. Riggs - my beloved - is an adorable, slightly ditzy, bubbly, high-energy pilot. Dizzy and Peri, the other two from the starting crew, also have their moments. You will unlock more crew members, each with their own speciality, selection of their own cards and, of course, unique personalities. The dialogues are short and snappy, but they often manage to put a smile on my face. While the story is serious, there's endless levity here, a bit of goofing off to take the edge off.

As for the mechanics, the meat of the game... Does COBALT CORE bring something new to the table? Well. Yes, even if the mechanical tidbits are a bit subtle. There is no one big, flashy feature that could sell the game alone on its innovation, but there are a lot of smaller fresh systems here that make the game sing. Positioning is the first one - both your and enemy ships take a certain footprint in space, and proper shifting around to avoid damage is the key to staying alive. But it's much more clever than that, because everything here is done step by step. You can shuffle one spot, fire your gun, then shuffle again. Being clever about the execution of your order of movements and playing cards quickly becomes second nature. And it offers vast tactical options, too. Every turn is a bit of a self-contained puzzle: how can I utilise the hand of cards to mitigate as much damage as possible while outputting firepower myself?

This is where the deckbuilder aspect of the game comes into play, too. I love a deckbuilder game that contains not only a vast array of cards and their variants, but also keeps in mind players' agency in crafting their deck. At the start of each run, we pick three crew members, and each of them comes with their own selection of cards as well as a main gimmick. Riggs, the pilot, has plenty of mobility cards. Peri, the gunner, offers plenty of firepower. Isaac, the drone specialist, lets you spawn mid-row drones, rocks, and rockets. And so on, and so on - picking the right three to cover all possible needs or a game plan is a great start. Then, during the run, you further modify your deck by acquiring new cards to suit your game plan and editing your deck at repair stations - removing bloat cards to keep your pile of cards trim, or upgrading your best cards into their more powerful variants.

Hard to be a roguelike without a branching path to add to the decisionmaking process!

I cannot overstate how well-designed this aspect of the whole experience is. The sky is the limit with what kind of peculiar builds you can cook up. One run I had barely any attack cards, but basically limitless evasion, jinking and shuffling out of danger with contemptuous ease. Then, after a few turns of charging my Beam card, I unleashed one devastating strike that often could one-shot most enemies. Another run I've managed to build an absolute tank, able to generate boatloads of temporary shielding every turn, barely moving out of enemy fire. And yet another successful loop was conquered by crafting a deck of damaging cards that ignore armour and shield, hit hard and stun enemy components, keeping me well secure. There is a lot of variety here and plenty of strategies to lean on to succeed.

Metaprogression is fairly limited, but impactful. You don't really get any passive upgrades to your staying power or damage output, nothing like that. You can unlock new ships with different layouts and functions. Each new crew member adds to your options. They bring their own cards, artefacts, and gameplay styles, enhancing your builds. Furthermore, the more comfortable you get with the systems, the easier it gets for you to beat loop after loop; you have ramping difficulty options to challenge yourself with. And they are well made, too - none of the simple 'enemies hit harder and are bigger' nonsense, but rather a growing list of modifiers that make the game more demanding and require better planning for each encounter.

Relics, just like cards, are often dependent on your crew members.

Artwise, COBALT CORE is decent. It's the usual fare - pixel art reigns supreme, simple, clean, effective. It's nothing I will be able to sing praises about, but it does make sure that everything is supremely clean in presentation. The user experience here is impeccable - zero confusion allowed; you should always know what enemies are going to do, what your cards will do, as well as get all the information on every single bit of the game with ease. That's a job well done, as for me, this is the aspect of the visual presentation that is most important in a tactical card game like this one. Music is fine; sounds are crunchy and distinctive. Again, nothing mind-blowing, but definitely executed well.

In summary, COBALT CORE manages to be a great example of how to make a deckbuilder game. It might not have blown me away with some astonishingly fresh take on any of the genre staples, nor is it particularly innovative in general. But it offers enough small, nice little systems to make it stand out from its peers. And the rich tactical options, complex build strategies and fun combat loop make for a dangerous mix of "just one more run, I swear" until the clock chimes at 3am in the morning and you blink, wearily, about how the time flies when you're having fun.