Author: Max Seidman

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.

Minecraft Dungeons

I spent months seeing ads for Minecraft Dungeons and assuming it was a fancy Minecraft mod. As it turns out it’s a completely different game. It uses Minecraft textures, sounds, creatures, and trappings (like the currency is emeralds), but its actually an Action RPG.

Blocky Diablo would also be accurate.

If you’re new the genre, ARPG is just a fancy name for a Diablo clone. It’s a 3rd person top down dungeon crawler where you collect loot and level up your character. As a big fan of Diablo II and a big fan of Minecraft, you might expect that this would be my kind of game… and you’d mostly be right.

I mostly enjoyed Minecraft Dungeons. While I didn’t play much endgame content or go to the much harder difficulties, I did clear the full story, and some of the postgame, and had a good time with it.

However, I have three fundamental problems with the game

  1. Lack of twangy guitar music.
  2. Consumable arrows.
  3. Map readability and collision.

While issue one pretty much speaks for itself, issue two is a bit more nuanced. Why does it matter that Minecraft Crayons has consumable arrows? To explain that, let’s talk about how the game handles skills.

Minecraft Funyons has an interesting “class” system. I put class in quotes because there are no set classes; how your character approaches the game depends entirely on what kind of gear you wear and enchantments you apply. If you want to be a rogue, you equip armor that makes you deal more physical damage. To be a tank, you equip armor that reduces the damage you take. If you want to be a caster, you equip armor that reduces the cooldowns on your artifacts (effectively your abilities), and then equip artifacts that deal damage. And if you want to be an archer, you equip armor that gives you extra ranged damage and extra arrows.

The problem is that the arrow economy is such that even with bonus arrow armor, enchantments, and artifacts, you STILL run out of arrows at some point each run. With at most 10 de facto classes, it’s a strange design choice to make one of them effectively unplayable.

My third issue was map readability. While the Minecraft style maps are very pretty, because all the elements are visually similar, I often found it hard to quickly figure out which terrain was walkable and which blocked me. And that’s a big problem when trying to make a split second decision with a million mobs following me. Hit a wall, and you’re dead.

Being pinned against terrain by a wave of enemies wouldn’t be terrible if the standard roll ability let you roll through the enemies, but it doesn’t, unlike almost every game I’ve ever played with a dodge. It also doesn’t actually dodge hits. All it does is give you a quick burst of speed followed by being slowed. Looking back, I found this design decision this most frustrating part of the game.

And there are a few other things that don’t quite make sense to me. The enchantment system seems to be built to encourage you to try out new sub builds frequently. But this never really worked. There are only two ways to get your enchantment points/levels back to try out a new item or build.

Option 1 is to salvage the original item, getting rid of it. If you do this and then don’t like your new build, you’re shit out of luck. Option 2 is go give your items to the Blacksmith, which gives you back your enchantment points, and then upgrades the item after your clear 3 levels. But again, if you don’t like your build, you’re still shit out of luck, abeit only for 3 runs. Why there isn’t just a “refund enchantment points” button is beyond me.

The game is also a bit buggy. While none of these are “Eat your savefile” or “Crash your machine” levels of bugs, they’re still annoying. For example, I fought a miniboss at the start of a level, and then spent the entire level listening to the dramatic boss music. Almost every chest you open spews some consumable items out of the level, entirely wasting them. Another time I rolled in the middle of combat and got stuck in a hole in the map.

Overall, I did have fun with it, even if it was somewhat simple. It honestly felt like the game was initially designed as a roguelike, but at some point they changed it to a perpetual gear chase. The addition of the Tower, a game mode that is quite literally a roguelike adds to that theory.

Minecraft Dungeons is available on pretty much every platform, and also has cross-play between all of them. So if you’re looking for a solid, but simple ARPG you can play with other folks, grab a copy, and sit back. Just be prepared to deal with some annoyances along the way. And if you’re still on the fence, you can read more about it here.

Ed Note: The post-game content is actually surprisingly extensive, and decent. I played it even if Max didn’t. It functions similar to PoE’s mapping system, in that the zones themselves are remixes of previously cleared areas with increased mob variety and specialties. It also has it’s own special gear chase with gilded items and whatnot. TLDR: Postgame good!

Islanders

A game with one mechanic has no right being this much fun.

When I turned 30, I realized that I no longer had nearly as much time to spend on games as I had previously. And like nearly every video gamer, my backlog of purchased but unplayed games is very long. So I don’t need any new games.

Then I saw Islanders on sale and was like “what the heck, it’s $2,” and impulse bought it. I’m super glad I did.

Islanders is an adorable and minimalist city-builder. The game gives you a beautiful low poly island, and asks you build a city on the island using just about a single mechanic: it gives you a set of buildings to place down in the form of cards in your hand. There is no inherent resource cost to playing a building. Instead, you try to place them to maximize the points they return.

Each building has a little radius that is shown when you place it, and when you place it, it scores based on that radius. For example, the Lumberjack building gives 1 point per tree in its radius, and deducts points per other Lumberjack in its radius. The Sawmill gives points per Lumberjack in its radius and deducts points per other Sawmill. Most buildings follow this simple pattern. There are things that they want to be next too, and things they don’t want to be next to.

And… that’s basically it. There’s a little point gauge and when it fills up, you get a choice of different types of buildings to add to your hand of unplaced buildings. If you ever place all the buildings in your hand without filling up the gauge, the game ends and you start over. 

When you place enough buildings on an island you’ll be able to travel to a new beautiful, procedurally generated island, but you’ll keep your total score. There’s probably some scaling here in that it feels like it gets harder and harder to fill the point gauge the farther you go, but I can’t tell quite what the ratio is.

The beauty of this game lies in its elegance, and how it uses the placement mechanic to incentivize (somewhat) realistic and interesting city configurations. For example, mansions and houses get bonus points for being next to City Centers. Both Houses and Mansions also score points for being near buildings of the same type as themselves. However, as Mansions are worth more points, but have a smaller scoring radius then a house, you end up wanting to place them closer to the city center, since you can’t place them as far out without losing the bonus. So the game incentivizes a city configuration where you have a City Center, surrounded by a small ring of Mansions, surrounded by a large ring of houses!

Discovering rarer building types and how they work is also fun. I always get a little kick out of seeing a clever new implementation of the mechanic, like how Shamans are worth points for each flower in their radius, and deduct points for each City Center… but Houses like to be next to Shamans. So initially your Shamans are in these secluded corners of the island, but then little towns spring up next to them.

And the game is chock full of fun little interactions like this! Some buildings can only be built on cliffs. Seaweed Farms can be placed in the ocean, which is otherwise hard to use. Warehouses get benefits from industrial buildings and city buildings, but industrial buildings and city buildings don’t want to be next to each other.

A nice little touch: there are many different island biomes. Each new island is strikingly visually different, and the terrain determines what kind of civilization you’re going to build! Mountainous islands are worse for cities and better for industrial civilizations because industrial buildings tend not to need to be densely packed.

Another thing I really like is the presentation. Whenever you start the game, behind the menu there’s a slowly rotating panorama of a built up island that looks like it was chosen in order to make a gorgeous backdrop for the menu screen… but it wasn’t! The island behind the menu screen is always the one you are currently working on. This just serves as a testament to how picturesque the game is–no matter what you do, your island is going to end up being menu screen material. 

I guess I should try to critique the game, but I could only come up with a couple things I don’t really like.

  1. Between the price point, the gameplay, and the art, Islanders feels like a mobile game. This isn’t actually a problem, it just means I wish they had it for mobile so I could go buy it there too. I felt the same way about Mini Metro, which came out with a fantastic mobile app, so fingers crossed.
  2. Playing and doing well is fun, but losing sneaks up on you. Maybe it’s because I was playing so casually, but I could never tell when I was going to lose. I’d place buildings until I only had 2 or 3 left and then realize “Hmm… I don’t think I’m going to be able to hit the points cap.” Ending with a whimper doesn’t feel great, especially when it’s a long run. And this might be an actual issue with the game if it was more competitive. But as it isn’t, I’d mostly consider it a minor qubbile.

Will I play Islanders forever? I doubt it. But this game is 100% worth its $5 price tag. If you ever want a calming experience to kill some downtime, Islanders is worth picking up. You can find it here on Steam.