Cobalt Core

2024-12-26

The elephant in the room (spaceship?) is that Cobalt Core is basically Slay the Spire but with adorable animals, adorable writing, great music, and yes, a veneer of S P A C E. I was initially a little let down that mechanically it really is just another roguelite deckbuilder. Combat is duked out between two ships that move horizontally lining up vertical attacks along different columns. Your ship is a static layout of components (no customization here, folks) and your cards determine what those parts do. There's some kinda interesting stuff with the middle space between two ships where you can shoot drones/missiles/asteroids and you can move your ship left/right to line up attacks or dodge others but if you've played Slay the Spire or its other progeny you'll feel right at home pretty quickly. There are infinite draw combos, one-big-attack decks, decks with infinite defense that poke with DOT poison--err, "acid".

And yeah that familiarity initially bummed me out a bit. We're in space and have cool ships but I can't Armored Core this shit up and make a ship that's all guns? But you know what, what is here feels tuned pretty damn well. I was having fun immediately and the cute-and-comic combo of the writing paired with the bumping soundtrack had me engaged--nay, addicted--for the 18 or so hours it took me to beat the true final boss. I don't need Wizbo the space rat-wizard to tell me that there's some magic here.