About “Cosmocrats” we told in a recent preview… Although the version of the game was already technically finished, some bugs made it difficult to trample the story campaign until the credits. Now, good, Kosmokrats completely passable, and technical roughness was completely crushed. Created by a Polish studio Pixel Delusion appeared before us in its entirety, and we are free to dissect it to the fullest extent of subjectivity and mood.
Let me remind you that Kosmokrats is dedicated to the everyday work of a spacecraft assembler. More figuratively, it’s a hardcore build. Lego in zero gravity. Under our control there is only a baby drone, with which we push the pieces of ships scattered across the screen, trying to assemble the desired model according to the drawing.
The background unfolds a completely repulsed story about the search for a new Earth by the socialist space fleet, which is accompanied by the most vigorous cranberries with a taste of vodka and the smell of comrades. Our decisions, successes and failures directly affect the course of the space odyssey. Being essentially an arcade puzzle, Kosmokrats, with its non-linearity, manages to evoke déjà vu with Mass effect, and in the number and variety of endings, the creation completely fits BioWare on the shoulder blades.
The main thing to consider before launching Kosmokrats is that this game will inevitably give you a nervous tic. Systematically increasing the complexity and the number of factors requiring your attention, a simple arcade game turns into one continuous disaster. The deceptive primitiveness of the first levels, when we lazily connect three parts and get the “perfect” grade, in an hour gives way to a complete loss of control over the situation. There are too many details, a bunch of debuffs are imposed on the drone, ships are overgrown with attachments that crumble from a couple of sloppy blows, astronauts start flying between the wreckage, and the game throws up various toxic bubbles, mines and asteroids …
If at first it is still possible to painlessly turn on the internal perfectionist, then from the middle of the game most of the tasks are inevitably summed up by a couple of crushed astronauts, a heel of broken attachments, and anyhow like a assembled ship in the last seconds.
On normal difficulty, you are free to slide into the menu right during the mission, so that you can restart it the next time you start it. A small factor of randomness can correct the initial conditions in your favor, but a completed task cannot be replayed, as well as a completely filled one. A logical question arises: what awaits the player who regularly buries his comrades between the parts of the ships, assembles structures not according to plan and breaks connections? Alas, the game is stingy with such information. Everything has to be probed empirically.
Towards the end, unfortunately, the luck factor begins to pull over an indecently large piece of the blanket. Here you quickly and accurately assemble the necessary spacecraft, waltzing between the mines, but an asteroid flies in from nowhere, touches a couple of mines, the comrades turn into a bloody mess, the bulging compartments with potatoes are blown into dust, the antennas fall off, and the parts of the ship fly away so far that the structure you physically will not be in time. One gets the feeling that no one liked the concept of “balance” during development, but new ways to turn the action into chaos were accepted without question. The apogee of madness will be the war that has come under the curtain of the campaign, which, among other things, will spice up our workdays with firing from laser cannons, and the interface elements, including the menu, will be covered with holes and cracks.
