Cobalt Review

Cobalt starts off pleasantly enough, introducing an intuitive combat system that lets you easily manage an arsenal of useful weapons and countermeasures to adjust to different foes and situations. I enjoyed stopping to soak in the soundtrack of catchy, kitschy elevator-music electronica as I guided my maneuverable robotic avatar through the expansive levels. Early encounters do a decent job of teaching the fundamentals of combat and exploration. Hidden caches of loot nearly always rewarded my curiosity.

The frustration ramps up quickly. Enemy placement in story mode often seemed either random or malicious, resulting in a number of unpreventable deaths at the hands of arbitrarily timed high-explosives or unseen snipers. Cobalt gives you precision tools and encourages you to flex your muscles and utilize a speedy, bullet time-fueled agility to block incoming projectiles and return fire, but more often than not the reward for boldness was a frustrating, unfair-feeling demise.

I met my many ends at the hands of grenades that dropped the moment I struck an enemy, foes that leapt from hidden alcoves and gave me no time to react, or heavy objects that sometimes spawned immediately above me, crushing me before I ever knew they were there. High-explosive dynamite sometimes dropped too closely in narrow passageways to allow any reasonable chance of escape. It’s made less painful by quick respawn times, but that doesn’t take away the aggravation of feeling my time’s been wasted by lethal obstacles I couldn’t have seen coming.

In the moments where I was free to use the wide variety of customizable weapons and defensive maneuvers available to me, Cobalt was a lot of fun. Carefully timed flips allowed me to send projectiles screaming back at foes, and I had a great time searching for the plentiful secrets scattered around the seven story levels. Late in the story campaign, I especially enjoyed acquiring a sort of robot mind-control weapon which allowed me to opt for a more stealthy and systematic approach to enemies. Rather than diving into battle, I sneaked about and hung back, letting my robot minions do the killing for me.

But every time Cobalt started to shine, another problem reared its ugly head: the irritating respawn system sometimes resurrected me surrounded by enemies, who took the opportunity to instantly kill me again. It forced me to restart several times in succession and spam the roll-defense button until I happened upon the lucky moment when I could limp away.

I also wasn’t a fan of the bland and repetitive boss battles, which were mostly retreads of one another with a compounded difficulty. Every climactic encounter was fundamentally a longer, more difficult version of previous challenges as I scrambled from terminal to terminal, deactivating nodes while fighting waves of rapidly-spawning minions. I’d have liked more variety in these boss fights.

Unfortunately, I never got to see the end of Cobalt’s Story mode. About 12 hours in, I encountered a game-breaking bug that prevented a key I needed from appearing. I simply couldn’t progress, and no amount of creative resetting could fix my broken save.

Multiplayer modes are better implemented. The automatic slow-motion physics triggered by approaching projectiles contribute to rewarding deathmatches and team events, and allow the artful combat mechanics to really shine. Eight-player bouts are reminiscent of quality matches in Towerfall or Samurai Gunn, and the bullet-time physics really make it easy to tell exactly where everybody is at any given second, despite the chaos.

Additionally, Cobalt’s arcade mode includes a collection of enjoyable combat challenges and speed runs. They’re competent diversions, and wisely designed to play to Cobalt’s greatest strengths: the responsive controls and momentum-based agility. I wasn’t blown away by any of these modes, but I had a good time fooling around.