Cobalt Core
Cobalt Core is a deckbuilding roguelike about some cute loveable characters stuck in a spaceship during a time loop. Each time you complete a run, you discover a little more about what's happening in the form of seeing a memory of one of the crew members X days before the loop began. The dialogue is brilliant and the pixel art style is lovely. I really enjoyed it for about 20 hours before it started to feel repetitive. It's a great self-contained game, although it doesn't have the replayability of Slay the Spire. There's some great original mechanics here though - 2 kinds of shields, different weapons, ship movement - all packaged into a deck of cards.
Pros
- Great dialogue
- Your ship is crewed by three people, and each have their own deck / specialtiesÂ
- Variety of enemies that feel like puzzles (shield generators, drones, missiles, large ships, small evasive ones)
- I love the engineering deck, focused around drones and midrow manipulation
- When you upgrade a card, you get to choose between 2 variants
- Works great on Steam Deck
- Fun events. I ran into a toad who had a malfunctioning missile bay and had to shoot down all his missiles to save him
- There are dialogue interactions between your crew members and some of the enemies you face
- Lots of options for play styles
- Multiple defensive styles such as movement and shields (both persist between turns), instant movement, temporary shields, stun
- 5 ships, each with different relics and play styles
Cons
- There are only 3 zones - not terrible in itself, but each of them are always the same and get dull quickly. Perhaps the zones could be randomised within a larger pool, or have different bosses
- When using a controller (Steam Deck), it’s impossible to open the menu items in the top left, like looking at your card deck
- There are a very limited number of events, so I've seen the same ones over and over within quite a short amount of time