Wait a minute. I must have played a buff card a few turns ago. But this card makes my main gun fire every time my ship moves. So if I play this card, fire the engine, and fly one space to the right, I can automatically fire again and destroy their ship before it gets burned by the self-inflicted inferno. Will it really... Will it work?
Cobalt Core is a deck builder full of these winning moments. Sometimes everything lines up perfectly and you win the most crazy space battle victory since someone realized that the Death Star's defenses needed a tune-up. It's a series of wonderfully tense turn-based spaceship showdowns. You have your own little ship, a handful of cards that allow you to move, shoot, shield, etc., and a limited energy pool to play them, which is refreshed each turn; all of which will be familiar to anyone who has lost once or twice in Slay the Spire. What sets Cobalt apart is its emphasis on movement.
Each turn you see the enemy ship's intent, which is usually to "shoot you." You can also build up your shields to withstand the blast. But it would be much more satisfying to attack and dodge before you know what hit you." Certain ships can move left or right by using the leftmost or rightmost card in their hand, respectively. There are also large gaps in the hulls, and it is harmless to fire through them as your opponent attacks (you can't help but feel a sense of pure egotism when you pull this off.) Despite being completely turn-based, "Cobalt Core" brilliantly captures the thrill of dogfighting, constantly moving in and out of cover, with the It's a great representation of the game. It's absurdly impressive, and I hope the Starfield modding community will stop retiring and put this in.
You start with a crew of three, each with unique cards and approaches (e.g., one is an expert in movement and the other has a great firepower card but sadly overheats your ship). Finding a trio that works together is as much fun as hitting "randomize" and having success with a group that on paper should not work at all. For each successful battle, you can choose from three new cards to add to your deck. The basic core of Shield, Dodge, and Attack is soon joined by launchable drones, missiles, and cards that allow you to hack an enemy ship and hit yourself with a missile (I love this one and am considering proposing it).
With eight characters to unlock, there are plenty of trios to try. Sometimes, when you are barely scraping by on a drop of strength, the card that the entire strategy has been relying on finally drops. Or better yet, there comes a moment when it seems like the last ten minutes of dilly-dallying over your cards were worth it.
My favorite deckbuilders are basically a series of agonizing decisions, and Cobalt Core has plenty of them. In between battles, you run into NPCs who heal your ship (unfortunately damage continues throughout the battle), upgrade one card, or remove one from your deck.
After each battle, the player decides which route to take on the star map. Each route leads to either a normal battle, a question mark (random event, incredibly dangerous, or incredibly stupid), the aforementioned healer/upgrade, or a fight with an elite enemy. Naturally challenging, but winning the fight against the elite gives you cards and artifacts, incredibly useful amulets that increase your shields and mobility, start your ship, and so on. It's also nice to be able to adjust the difficulty on the fly, depending on the route, and risky choices are well rewarded.
Even when everything is running great in harmony, it's one or two silly mistakes that blow up, which adds to the tension. At one point, I liked a little too much the strategy of giving a corrosion debuff to slowly reduce the strength of the opposing ship, a practice that Sun Tzu might have called "running away". It was fine until you had to fight the ship in a corridor with no escape route. The enemy stubbornly refuses to stick to one strategy.
After 40 hours, I still enjoyed constantly searching for the perfect deck and trying different crew combinations. It became my new podcast game. Until I remembered how great the soundtrack was and got fed up and turned off my PC Gamer Chat Log. Listen to the following tracks and imagine that they might appear in a bad game:
It's shocking to lose a run you've spent an hour on, but don't mourn the crew. They will be back in seconds. This is a time-loop game, like Into the Breach or Every Game These Days. But it is enlivened by a cast that takes the exhausting setting, which is practically comatose, rather well.
There is no narrative dissonance here, and the talking animals enjoy the gunfights as much as you do. It's easy to like them, thanks to a funny and punchy script. Most of the conversations are only a few lines long, so they don't drag on, and you can get right back to the action with a smile on your face. The deadpan, jovial tone is consistent throughout. At one point, I tried my hand at the silliest soccer game ever, in which myself and one other ship fire balls at each other's goals. Could "Starfield" be given this modification?
If successful, the game will flash back to the events just before the time loop. Each character has three memories to unlock, and once you have them all, you are ready to finish the game. There are several difficulty settings, but no tremendously long tails like in "Slay the Spire" or "Monster Train". But then again, Cobalt Core was launched last November by a development team of just three people. Who cares if it's not designed to last forever at this point?" The game, which can be played for a full 40 hours, is FTL meets Into the Breach meets Slay the Spire. If you don't want to play it, you're probably reading the wrong website.
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