HomeFeaturesCobalt Core
Cobalt Core is wonderful because it’s actually PongThat’s a paddling
That’s a paddling
Image credit:Brace Yourself Games/Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Brace Yourself Games/Rock Paper Shotgun
Fine, I guess I’ll show my working. To the uneducated eye, Cobalt Core might appear to be a lush tactics experience withunspeakably suave musicin which kitbashed, wide-bottomed spaceships take turns to dodge, shoot or defend using the medium of cards. As in other roguelike deckbuilders, each run sees you acquiring and upgrading these cards, which correspond to ship systems such as beam cannons and shield generators, while moving through a campaign made up of minor or major enemy encounters, resourcing or repairing opportunities, and chapter-ending bossfights.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Brace Yourself Games
In the abstract, it might sound interchangeable with other, ultra-replayable sci-fi card-wranglers such asBreachway, another space sim I’ve been rogueliking lately (Steam demo here). But Cobalt Core has an arcade flourish that helps it stand apart: your ship, the enemy’s ship and all projectiles rest on a layout of 2D columns. Play cards that grant you evasion tokens, and you can skip a few columns left or right to avoid telegraphed attacks (or at least,the bulk of them), ideally while lining up your own cannon with vulnerable parts of the other ship, be it a fragile hull component or a big gun you can paralyse for a turn.
Some cards combine moving with attacking and energising your all-important shield reservoir - a feint card, for example, which launches you a couple of columns to the left, fires off a shot, then skips you back one column right. Whether moves like these are match-winners depends heavily on your choice of vessel. If you have a cannon mounted on your ship’s right half, that particular feint card might not be so helpful, but if you meet certain characters on a run, you can modify or scramble your ship design to support your deck. I haven’t unearthed all the ship-modifying possibilities yet, but it feels like there’s some fun complexity here: you can build gaps into your ship, for example, so that attacks pass straight through.
Image credit:vghchannel
If you have never played Breakout or Pong, I can only assume that you are very young, and I hope you will forgive a foolish old man for taking you on a quick tour of memory lane (mind where the dog’s been). Pong is one of the first videogames ever released, and is basicallymultiplayer2D tennis with floating paddles, no net and no air friction. Breakout is a little more recent: it’s Pong, but instead of trying to sneak the ball past an opponent, you’re bouncing the ball off a big wall of coloured, destructible bricks, trying to clear them all away before you run out of Continues.
In both games, there’s an art to not just intercepting the ball but having it touch the right point on your paddle, so as to send it zipping back at a preferred angle. In Pong, you’re trying to drive an opponent to one side during a rally, before vengefully launching the ball back in the opposite direction. In Breakout, you’re trying to ricochet the ball behind the bricks so that it’ll bounce off the backwall and erode the whole mass from the rear, like a Honey Badger smuggled into an outpost inFar Cry 5.
The ability to modify your ship layout in Cobalt Core also make me think of paddle power-ups or modifiers in Breakout and its many, many successors - making the paddle wider or narrower, for example. The game’s more arcane cards, including corrosive ammo and a chargeable cannon whose power increases every time it’s played, also put me in mind of the wider “block buster” genre’s various ball power-ups - exploding balls, balls that split in two, balls that set bricks alight, and so on.
Cobalt Core Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
Cobalt Core Launch Trailer
