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.

I think, realistically, I should review this game as a total package and not just by giving it praise for the few things it does really well. As a whole, COGEN is frustrating not because of any legitimately good reasons, but as a result of tons of amateurish mistakes regarding fundamental issues such as hitboxes, level design, and general game feel. A few minutes into COGEN's 1st stage, enemies were rolling up a very slight (20 degree) slope at me and I WAS UNABLE TO HIT THEM IN ANY WAY BECAUSE KOHAKU CANNOT SWING HER SWORD DOWNWARD. She has a crouching sword stab, but the angle of this attack actually goes up and the hitbox is a narrow rectangle with no downward vertical reach. Kohaku also has no command downward attacks in midair. These simple enemies were invincible, unless I awkwardly jumped over them to get onto the low ground of the slope and then attacked them that way... not because of intelligent game design, but because of poor hitboxes and glaring omissions in my character's moveset. The entire game is like this. I was ranting about these issues in voice chat to my friends while streaming the game, and everyone's consensus was that COGEN and specifically Kohaku as a character "kinda looked like sheit." I'd get clipped from boss attacks I jumped over because Kohaku's sprite is massive and every pixel of it is a gigantic hurtbox, so getting your toes clipped counts as getting hit. I'd wait on Crushers (Thwomps) only to get trapped between them because the developer gave each group of Crushers RANDOM timings instead of patterns, so they can randomly sync up to create an unavoidable deathtrap if you're under an "Up" Crusher while waiting for a "Down" Crusher to move. The only counterplay to this is to wait for a better random pattern. You can get score bonuses by doing certain actions in a stage, but once the bonus is unlocked once (tracked as an achievement system), the game keeps awarding you those points at the end of every stage even if you didn't do anything??? This results in you effortlessly getting giga-points and SS ranks just for grinding out a bunch of single-run achievements, one-at-a-time: what the heck??? The only move with i-frames is a button for a dodge roll but it only works on the ground and only goes a specific, needlessly long distance. There's not even a brief air-dodge or any function for the button midair, and you never get additional actions for it even though the menu calls it "Action" and not "Dodge" (implying that there would be more actions later). The entire game is full of frustrating trial-and-error design. They even messed up something as simple as the difference between walking and dashing speeds: they're too similar so dashing "feels bad" because it's barely any faster than walking. It has an animation that implies speed, but without the speed. It's possible for you to master COGEN: Sword of Rewind and to have fun with it... but the game fights you every step of the way. Some aspects of the game, such as the control options and the music, and especially the 2D character portrait art: are really good. But then you have to look at the actual pixel art of the rest of the game, which is mediocre to terrible: especially for the price tag and relative to other indie games you could be playing. The bad frequently outweighs the good, and that's not even touching on fact that the game has a second loop which ramps all the frustrating parts up to 11. I played this game more than most people who would leave a negative review like this, but I *only know this game exists because of Luminous Avenger iX 2". I specifically bought this to play as Copen and partially to support both devs for the crossover stuff, but that's not typically why someone buys a video game. Generally, you buy a game because it's fun to play, and COGEN will fight you the entire time: try the available demo before buying.