Cortex Command is brilliant, but unfortunately still incomplete. The strong community is trying to fix the many problems the games has, but as of now it still not enough. For almost twenty euros we can recommend the game only to the most patient gamers.
This game is great. However, it's selective. It takes time to get used to it, and it takes time to look past the negatives of the game. Cortex Command was a game that was plagued by it's creators. Cortex Command sat, unupdated and neglected by Data Realms. It looked as if the game was a failed project, as Data Realms went to make new games, ones objectively worse. However, Data Realms built the game for modding, and the small, but determined modding community made this game amazing. I will start with the tried-and-true method of a list of this games pros, cons, and gray areas. If you don't want to read that though, here's my recommendation: play the game, but buy it on sale. Right now, it's $20. This is absurd. But it commonly goes on a huge sale to be around $5, which is really what it's worth.
The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and the mods.
- The Good
This game has some of the best, natural-high inducing moments. Moments where you are desperately standing, fighting toe-to-toe with superior enemies, but manage to pull through by shooting out a dropship rocket and watching as the ship spins out of control and kills the enemies ahead of you, blocking the path to your bunker and being able to prepare for the next wave. Moments like these fill you with dopamine, and have you truly feel for your men. If you have some good imagination, this game will be a blast. However, outside of those moments, fighting is still fun in battles, though nothing like those high-moments. Luckily, those high-moments happen often, and will never get old.
- The Bad.
This game has some really, really bad polish. It has bugs, climbing ladders is annoying and a one-time trip as they break under the weight of those climbing them, rendering a lot of mods without jetpacks incredibly annoying. These mods usually include structures themselves so bunkers aren't necessary, as playing in a bunker without jetpacks is virtually impossible. The campaign also isn't exactly amazing. It is slow, annoying and doesn't make much sense. It gets repetitve. This is why I believe many people here have given this game bad reviews. They believe the campaign is everything simply because it is in other games. It is NOT. Please, if you want a campaign-like experience, play some of the mod campaigns, aka one of the best mods in existence- Void Wanderers.
- The Ugly
Though there's not much ingame ugliness, there is a whole lot of outergame ugly. The fact that this game was horribly neglected by Data Realms, set to $20, and they went to make other games that are alright, but just feel like they completely wasted potential with Cortex Command. If Data Realms were ever to come back to this game and invest into it, this game could be amazing, and could once again appeal to the modern gaming community. But it seems that they have abandoned it, and it's very sad. The modding community has also slowed down, as this game is incredibly old. Many modders started on Cortex, but now go on to mod bigger, better titles. This isn't bad, in fact it's good, we get new modders for other games. But it's sad to see such a great, but flawed, highly-potential game go to waste like it does now. As well as the fact that it seems Data Realms has updated the game with the modding community barely in sight, sometimes destroying the mods for the game.
- The Mods.
This is arguably the best part of the game. Some of the mods for this game are extrodinary. Some of them feel vanilla. Of course, there are plenty of atrocious mods made by children out there, but most of the good mods that you will find are amazing. Here's some of the best-
Void Wanderers. It turns the game completely round, making the campaign fun and actually something you can put hours into. It's a blast and has more polish than the game itself.
The Loyalists. This mod is a WW1/Warhammer 40k inspired faction, which adds horrible soldiers, weapons, vehicles and buildings. It is essentially the embodiment of Sabatons TLS. This mod sounds very unfun at first, but once I played it, I couldn't stop. It made those high-moments of the game so much better. Everything changes when you are so weak, fighting and can only rely on your tactical, strategical, and combat prowess to win the fight against sci-fi space soldiers. It's a very challenging but uniquely fun faction to play as, and I definitely recommend it if you want a challenge to play as.
Warhammer 40k- Imperium of Man. This adds the Imperium of Man. The Space Marines are brutally unfair to fight against, and completely steamroll enemies. However, the Imperial Guardsman are fairly vanilla balanced, cheap and viable. Unfortunately, it's broken in that you can not play against it without fighting a bunch of corpse-clones.
Many more. Please, if you buy this game, despite its age, explore the mods after learning the basics of the game. You will have an extreme amount of fun.
After a decade of Cortex Command development we've lived to see its "final" version. That alone is a cause to rejoice. Unfortunately, you will be merry until the very moment when you find out the game is still a semi-finished product with a hint of great gameplay.
Playing Cortex Command breaks my heart. With online multiplayer, improved AI, more scenarios and a more fleshed out campaign it could be something truly great, but for now it's just a number of cool ideas and great looks grafted onto noticeably repetitious level design and sub-optimal local multiplayer.
As a child I had always dreamed **** like this. As an adult, I fully appreciate it. Even in a somewhat unfinished state I consider it a fun game. I don't find that it can satisfy me for endless hours, but I can give it a couple hours of enjoyable mayhem. If it was better, that'd be great, but as it stands I still think it's alright. Mostly because it is my kind of thing. I will say the AI can be a bit too quick to react considering the difficult controls for us humans.
Minecraft got a 93 while this got a 44? Bah. Hypocrisy at it's finest.
This game has been playable on any machine for me. Sure, considering it is designed for single core machines, it is a lot slower than it should be, but multi-core processors were a big thing in the early 2000s or late 1990's, and weren't available commercially. When you design an engine, it is really hard to go back and fix it. In fact, to be able to support a multi-core processor, you need to completely redesign the engine. They are a pain to have a program utilize.
As for gameplay, the metagame gets old really fast, but I find lots of the senario battles are fun, as you can find different ways to solve a problem. The game truly depends on user generated content, but, then again, so do a huge amount of the crap indie games out there.
I can accept bad graphics in this case, as each pixel can be physics object, therefore, HD gameplay would make the lag worse than it already is.
As for multiplayer, there was a mod adding multiplayer, but it was not the easiest thing to make, or update. I would
As for the developer insulting and leaving the community, there are reasons. Justifiable reasons. You treated him as if he was a corporate entity. You expected everything to be fixed on the spot. He made the game to make the game, not to listen to your **** It's his game after all, your choice if you wanted to buy it. Also, he has a job, and a life.
The learning curve is a bit like, I dunno, a challenge? The amount of games who are actually hard is incredibly small. Don't expect to be able to pickup and play like COD, this is a RTS, not some silly run around shooting people and swearing over the internet. (Ok, maybe it is silly.)
I would say play it before you buy it. If you like it, you can then buy it, and fool around. If you can't figure it out, you didn't waste any money.
I find the premise of this game very interesting. Build a bunker to defend your brain and control several "bots" to defend, mine and attack. I want to like it a lot more but the game is far from a polished product. The new campaign button will even warn you that the game lacks polish. Too bad the developer didn't tell people that before taking their money.
The game play itself is painfully slow. I am a patient person, but the speed at which bots move is unbearably slow. It becomes almost painful to hold down the key/button to make your bot walk all the way across your bunker. Most of what you do is make the bots walk to where they need to be so this is a real problem. Bot movement is very goofy. I am still not sure if this was an intentional design choice as you are supposed to remote controlling these bots. The physics were just off in a lot of situations. Several of my bots stuck to walls or fell off the edge of the map, never to be seen again.
I have heard that the developer is still working on the game actively. If there are improvements made this score could jump higher. But as-is this is not worth $20. There are so many better indie games out there for a lot less. I would wait until the developer has made an effort to fix this mess before trying it.
SummaryMine precious gold from the deformable pixel terrain in order to buy more and better ships, soldiers, weapons, digging tools, and deployable defenses. Use these assets to defend your disembodied brain and bankrupt your opponent! Old-school 2D sidescroller pixel graphics coupled with an extremely detailed physics simulation makes for a mi...