Cobalt Core review

written 2025-03-14

Cobalt Core is a deckbuilding roguelike about spaceship combat that I played in 2025-03. I found it from a friend mentioning how good its soundtrack is, and holy crap is its soundtrack good, and holy crap is the game good! From the day I started, I got addicted to the point of spending almost entire days playing it. It has a story that progresses from completing runs and I finished it in about 36 runs, lasting an hour each.

Format

For each run, you pick a crew of 3 of 8 characters and 1 of 5 ships, and traverse a graph of events including battles, upgrade stations, and random events. You start with a deck of 4 basic cards + 2 for each crew member. The crew members you have determine what new cards you can get offered as rewards for battles - each one has a unique playstyle.

Unfortunately, the journey map is the weakest part of the game. There are two main problems: uninformed choices and imbalanced choices.

Uninformed choices: nodes are only marked as vague things like "normal battle", "elite battle", and "mystery event". Builds can be strong vs certain enemies but weak vs others, and if you could see which enemy is where, you could strategize around that by avoiding enemies your build is weak against and taking upgrades that will help against a specific enemy you won't be able to avoid later in the journey. Also, often you're just choosing between two nodes of the same type which makes the choice completely meaningless ("would you like to fight an elite or fight an elite? 🤔🤔🤔"). For contrast, Hellcard is a similar game where you can see what type of monster is in each location.

Imbalanced choices: in my opinion it's never worth not going to an upgrade station if you can. It's never worth going for a normal battle over anything else. The normal battles only offer you to add 1 of 3 random cards to your deck, and it's usually best to refuse those rewards entirely. Elite battles offer a card reward and an artifact, which is a passive buff that doesn't need to be drawn. Sure, elite battles are more dangerous, but missing out on that artifact will make the rest of the run more dangerous, so I always choose an elite over a normal enemy. Upgrade stations offer you to upgrade a card of your choosing to a more powerful version of itself *or* to remove a weaker card from your deck, and this is almost always better than any other map node, especially since there's no risk involved.

Battle

The battle system is where the main innovations of the game are. It has a one-dimensional position system that lets you move perpendicular to the enemy; ships are composed of a row of parts like cannons, missile bays, and cockpits that have different purposes and sometimes different effects when you shoot them. Normal attacks only come out of cannons, so you have to spend moves to align your cannon with your desired target. Cockpits usually take extra damage, and some enemy ship parts will cancel their upcoming actions if hit.

The battles are not symmetric: enemies don't have cards, and always show you what each part of their ship is gonna do one turn ahead of time so you can counter it. You can deal with enemy attacks in 4 main ways:

Playing cards that give you shield, which can absorb a certain amount of damage
Playing cards that give you moves, so you can move out of the way
Playing cards that launch drones and other objects from your missile bay which can block a hit
Playing cards that stun a part of the enemy ship, canceling its action

I really like how balanced these options are, in that you need to use a combination of them. You can't shield everything because some enemies have very big hits. You can't dodge everything because some enemies attack from a wide spread of cannons all at once, or have seeker missiles which can't be dodged. Blocking attacks with midrow objects requires you to align your missile bay with them. Stunning enemy weapons requires you to align your cannon with them.

When you're not in immediate danger, deciding which resource to prepare is also interesting. When I was a newb I'd always play damage cards, but I found that this often left me unable to avoid hull damage on the next turn, since I might not draw enough defensive cards. It's sometimes better to pass the opportunity to deal damage to instead get some moves or shield ahead of time to protect against unexpected dangers. You can check what's in your draw pile, too, to know how worried you should be: if you have 5 cards left in your draw pile and one of them gives moves, then you're guaranteed to have moves next turn.

The individual card balance is also way better than most card games. There are no single cards that eclipse all their competition, and only a handful I think are really underpowered. Something I really liked is a random event with a character who offers you 1 of 4 seemingly useless cards, like "take 1 damage, then heal yourself for 1 hp", and your characters even comment on how useless these are, but there are synergies that can make them actually good!

The game could really use some preview mechanics, like letting you see what a movement will look like before you commit to it, and showing how much damage you're going to take if you end your turn. As is you have to count these things manually, and it's quite often I get them wrong, think I have enough shield and then my ship takes hull damage, and things move so fast that I don't have time to see how it happened.

Progression

I really love how well this game keeps itself fresh by unlocking new characters and ships. Each one has really interesting unique mechanics, like a ship that has two cannons and switches between them every time you play a card, making you think about order in ways you normally don't; a ship that moves left and right when you play the left/rightmost card in your hand, a character whose cards can add attributes to other cards; and a ship that has no cannons, but can launch special drones from its missile bay that it attacks through, meaning your attack cards can be doubled or more if you have multiple of these drones out.

Dynamic dialogue

I really like the dynamic dialogue, where characters respond to gameplay events. For example, if you miss with an attack card, one character might say something like "jeez guys, let me aim the cannon!" Most enemies have faces and names and exchange funny dialogue with your characters during a fight, sometimes even continuing from dialogue you had with them on your last run.

There's an artifact that replaces your cockpit with empty scaffolding which can't be shot at, and if you get it you get dialogue joking about how it doesn't make sense that your ship seemingly has no cockpit and your crew members don't understand how it works.

Story

The plot is never really explained even after you unlock all the memories. You can maybe headcanon it into making some kind of sense, but that's frustrating to even try to do because pieces of it are given through one-time dialogues that aren't included in the memories so you can't review them and I couldn't find anyone having posted them online. So, I think the plot of this game is pretty much worth nothing, but the character interactions are fun anyway.