Month: August 2024

Cobalt Core

I finished Cobalt Core months and months ago, and Fritz has been bothering me to review is ever since. So! To buy myself some peace and quiet, let’s talk about this sci-fi roguelike deckbuilder.

This game was made for me. I love roguelikes, especially roguelike deckbuilders—I’ve 100% completed Hades and Slay the Spire, and I’ve sunk countless hours into trying to do the same in Monster Train (not yet, but one day). I’m a sucker for crew-on-a spaceship games. And Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of my favorite games ever (published by Brace Yourself Games, the publisher of Cobalt Core).

So on paper, a spaceship deckbuilder roguelike that’s like if FTL, Hades, and Slay the Spire had a baby published by the publisher of Crypt of the Necrodancer would be the perfect game for me… And it is. Cobalt Core is fantastic.

The Mechanics

Okay yeah I guess I have to explain the mechanics.

You have a spaceship. It points to the top of the screen.

There’s an opposing spaceship. It points down towards you. Fight!

You and the opposing spaceship take turns. On your turn you play the hand of cards you drew from your deck, doing things like firing your blasters, activating your drone bays, shielding your ship, or moving your ship left and right. Your ships are aligned in vertical lanes, so that each component of your ship is lined up with a component on the opponent’s ship (or empty space). You’ll move your ship around to try to make sure that your blasters line up with the opponent’s vulnerable cockpit, and that their blasters line up with empty space.

The rest is pretty straightforward deckbuilder roguelike. Try to kill the opposing ship without taking too much damage (ideally none). Spend money to upgrade your ship with “relics” (to borrow the term from Slay The Spire) heal yourself, and add cards to your deck. Choose your route through each system between combat, hard combats, shops, encounters, etc. Each system ends with a miniboss, and you’re trying to beat the final boss.

And there are a reasonable amount of pre-run options. You can choose different ships with different specialties and configurations. Also each card in the game belongs to one of several suits, one for each of the crew members. At the start of the run you choose which 3 crew members you’d like to play with this time, and that determines what cards you can see. Each crew member has their own focal mechanics, like the one who’s good at drones, or the one who has strong attacks that overheat your ship.

The Story

Another place Cobalt Core really shines is its story. For a while, it seemed like roguelikes and story didn’t mix, and most deckbuilder roguelikes didn’t even try to have a story.

(To some extent, I wonder how much “writing story” and “designing card game mechanics” are skill sets that don’t overlap.)

When they tried, the narrative would be very very lightly implied with environmental storytelling. Seriously, why are we slaying this spire? Something something, pact with heaven, so now I’m on a monster train.

Then Hades happened, and suddenly every roguelike is trying to be character- and story-driven. It’s really hard to land that, but Cobalt Core pulls it off. The characters are cute, and I wanted to learn more about them. And perhaps even more challenging: the dialogue is good and funny. I’m not going to write anything more in order to avoid spoilers. Just go play it.

The one iffy story bit is how the story is rolled out. Whenever you win a run, you can unlock the next cutscene from one of the crew members you chose to play with. When you unlock all the cutscenes, there’s a final final boss battle and you can win.

I didn’t mind this, and I was interested to unlock all the custscenes. But the cutscenes got in the way of the “one more run” feeling that can make roguelikes so great. The most clever roguelikes even elide one run into the next so that you just keep trying. And Cobalt Core’s cutscenes do the opposite, interrupting my play experience and providing a point to put down the game. Even though I liked the scenes, I often found myself pausing the game and walking away without watching them.

I don’t really know why Hades is able to offer story in the hub without disrupting that flow. Maybe it’s because each of the dialogue updates you get from characters are so short, and there are always only a few. But I’d have liked to see more of that in Cobalt Core.

The Problem

In my opinion Cobalt Core has one big problem: there just isn’t enough of it. Is it worth the $20 price tag? Absolutely. In fact, go buy it now on Steam or Switch.

But I’m used to roguelikes really letting me test my mettle by giving me tons of difficulty ratchets and interesting achievements to chase. Cobalt Core really doesn’t have these. It has a few ships and 4 or so difficulty increases to unlock, but there’s no incentive to even play on those other ships. I had to invent my own personal goal of winning on highest difficulty with each of the ships, and even that wasn’t too hard.

So in short, go buy this game, play it, and then the studio can invest that money in adding to the game. I don’t even want much; just a list of arbitrary challenges/achievements, and maybe 15 more difficulty ratchets. Add those, and I think Cobalt Core is perfect.

X-Angels

Ed Note: This write-up discusses content intended for an 18+ audience. There is no intrinsically 18+ content or art in this write up, but there are images that some might consider risque, and there are links to content that is 18+ (Though that content is age-gated a second time). All of which is to say: You have been warned.

Prologue

I played a great game recently that I probably can’t recommend to you.

That said, you can know for sure if you’d enjoy it by answering a few questions:

  1. Do you like deck-builders?
  2. Are you interested in seeing a very competent, if a bit limited execution of the genre? One that maps the whole thing into a much larger, longer run of an experience with some visual novels elements?

Yes to both so far?

Great.

How do you feel about hardcore animated pornography?

Ed Note: It occurs to me after writing all of this, I should probably be a bit more specific in who this game is for. The porn in X-Angels is very much geared toward straight men. Sorry for anyone else whose hopes I might have gotten up.

Act 1. I Play It For The Mechanics

X-Angels, by BaranceStudio, is an incredibly fun, if somewhat limited deckbuilder, probably best compared to Slay the Spire. Like Slay the Spire, each turn, you draw a hand of cards, and play them to deal damage to enemies and opponents. Cards have variety of effects, ranging from damage, to generating shields to block incoming, to generating buffs, de-buffing, or applying permanent triggers to yourself.

But if you’re still here, you probably answered “Yes” to two of those questions above. You know about digital deck builders. So let’s talk about all the things you haven’t seen before.

Now, is it a deep and meaningful visual novel experience? No. Not really.

Each “Run” of X-Angels takes place parallel to sort of visual novel experience. This on its own is actually pretty neat. The game feels more akin to full campaign than to a roguelike, and you can choose to do the games various areas in different orders. A single run takes a fair bit longer than comparable games, especially on the hard difficulty.

X-Angels also adds a system where, based on the first two characters you recruit (of four), those two characters define your deck-building and your X-Power, a sort of side meter.

When this meter is filled, it can be used to be activate a special power or ability based on which character you have active. The second kicker is that you can switch between characters mid-fight, allowing you to build charge on one character, then swap to another character to use their burst. It’s a cool little mechanic.

These are quite neat, and range from conjuring extra cards into your deck, to purging debuffs on yourself. And again, this is an area where it feels like X-Angels goes harder than it needs to.

Many of Lia’s abilities effectively poison herself, or scale off poisoning herself. So instead of having to add cards to purge that poison, she can use her X-Power to do so.

Also, I really appreciate that the game has an actual story instead of just “Lore.” I am so tired of games that are just “Lore.” I would never say that X-Angels has better gameplay than Slay the Spire, Monster Train, or Inkbound but at least it has a story with an actual fucking ending.

Intermission 1.

Several years ago, while looking at the trash that shows up on Steam, me and my friends got into an discussion about what the worst possible mechanic you
could combine with erotic content would be.

After a bit, we settled on Sudoku.

Then one of those friends, one who actually finishes their side projects, went and actually made the whole thing. It has multiplayer!

It’s called Operation Sexy Sudoku, but, here’s a little inside scoop: that’s just because the developer called it as “Open Source Software” as its development code name.

You will need to be logged into Steam to see this.

Anyway, they had made most of the game, and realized that they didn’t have one of the more critical elements for this sort of project: The porn.

At this point, we started trawling around on itch.io, looking to see if there was an asset pack, or some easy way to get a lot of anime pornography
that could be used in the game. And while we found a pack, after researching, it turned it out it was someone stealing assets from a developer calling BaranceStudio, and trying to sell them for money.

This is how I found out about BaranceStudio, and ended up following them.

Act 2. Adult Content, For Adults

I did put a whole disclaimer at the front of this, so I’m going to keep this part brief, and non-explicit.

X-Angels operates off what I’d call “Porn Logic.” It’s mostly fairly vanilla, but there is an option to opt into what I’d call the “bad end” route, which contains the typical sort of dark ending content you might expect from anime porn.

If I was to describe the sort of adult content you’ll see in this game, I’d say: There’s nothing here that you wouldn’t find in a dark romance or hentai.

That said, there’s a lot here that is absolutely not part of a healthy adult relationship.

I think that’s enough of a disclaimer. If you want to learn more, the game has a mature content descriptor on the Steam page.

Intermission 2.

It’s kind of weird that sex, something that most people will do in their life, is much more taboo in games than murder, something presumably most of us have not done, and will never do.

The obvious take is that “sex” in games bears pretty much the same resemblance to sex in the real world as violence in games bears to violence in the real world.

After all, if I shoot someone in Fortnite, I haven’t actually murdered them. I’ve kicked them out of the game they are in. It’s less eternal void, and more being tagged out in capture the flag.

The parallel version, then, is probably something like “Sex in games is almost always porn or porn adjacent.”. It has the same relationship to the real complexities of sex and relationships that violence in games does. Which is to say, pretty much none.

Does anyone else think it’s a bit weird that most video games that have sex, it’s used as reward? It’s at the end of a romance option, or it’s unlocked in the secret ending. Porn games do the same. “You saved the day, here are some titties and/or dick” is not a particularly nuanced take regardless of whether it’s full frontal or not.

Also, it strikes me as odd that when something is “Adult” or “For Adults”, that almost always just means “It’s horny.” Not that it involves rent, or taxes,
or the difficulty of meeting people as you get older, or the stresses of aging, or complexities of modern life.

No, “Adult” means genitals.

Act 3.

So why am I writing about this?

Well, there’s an interesting post credit sequence in which the developers talk about their intentions, and there’s a bit where they say, “Hey, this game was much harder to program and implement than our previous games! Anyway, our next game is going to be something much more complex then this!”

And I kind of respect that, in the same way that I respected it when they responded to me and my friend asking about their assets.

We live in an era where it can be super lucrative to make exploitative gacha games that sell softcore porn. Basically, selling microtransaction lottery tickets to children for the chance to see “not quite porn.” BaranceStudio could have taken this approach. Instead, they made a direct, interesting, and well thought out porn game.

I just find it refreshing that someone made horny deckbuilder and sold it for $11.

Conclusion

So do I recommend X-Angels? Well, again, only if you like deck builders and male gaze-y animated porn. Okay, that’s a lot of qualifiers, but I think they’re pretty fair ones.

It’s not a perfect game. I didn’t encounter any game breaking bugs, but the save-file system is very wonky, and the translations are rough at times.

But if you do like the things mentioned above, and you prefer to earn your horny cutscenes instead of having them handed to you after you click through 90 lines of text, it’s pretty great.

X-Angels is $11 on Steam.