COGEN: Sword of Rewind / COGEN: 大鳥こはくと刻の剣 Reviews

NOTE: demo lacks control rebinding but the main game has it, also the walljump doesn't suck in the full release either At it's best, Cogen is just dollar store mega man zero. Very uninspired level gimmicks, meh boss fights, uninteresting story, it sure is a game trying to play like the zero games. It's extremely short, only 5 levels and then a hard mode for the true ending, and a weird in-game achievement system that means pretty much nothing. At it's worst, Cogen is ungodly frustrating, with some really finicky controls and hitboxes, slow bosses, screen crunch (yes, screen crunch in the modern day), and obnoxious enemy placement. It doesn't make good use of it's time rewinding gimmick, despite the fact that the whole THING about the game is "you die in one hit, use your time rewind to escape death", the rewind meter might as well be a healthbar anyway since it does NOTHING interesting with it aside from 2 very basic platforms that are affected by you rewinding, and the fact that getting hit will pause everything so you can rewind back anyway. The aforementioned hard mode is just "play the game again, but with extra bullshit enemy placement and the rewind meter no longer auto recharges", which 1. isn't very fun and 2. further reduces the rewind mechanic into just being a more complicated health bar. If you DESPERATELY need to play this, at least wait to get it on sale for 10 bucks like I did, even if the game played well the extremely limited amount of content doesn't justify the high pricetag.