Space Adventure Cobra - The Awakening

I came to this one purely as a run-and-gun guy with no history with the source material, and what I found was a game that keeps offering you something interesting every time it threatens to lose you. Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening is a level-based 2D side-scroller from Magic Pockets that pulls its structure from the Contra school of design but adds Metroid-lite backtracking and a weapon roster that actually asks you to think. You unlock gear like magnetic boots and a grappling hook as you progress, which lets you revisit earlier stages for tokens that expand Cobra's health and Psychogun potency. It is not a Metroidvania in the full sense, but the loop of returning with better tools does give the pacing a bit more texture than a straight left-to-right brawler would. The shooting is where the game earns its keep. The Psychogun is Cobra's bread and butter: a standard rapid-fire mode and a charged Psychoshot that stops time and lets you manually steer the energy beam through multiple targets or into environmental switches. From a pure input standpoint it feels snappy and satisfying, and routing a guided shot through a cluster of enemies to hit a door panel behind them is genuinely the kind of moment that keeps you in the chair. Alongside the Psychogun you carry the Colt Python 77 revolver for enemies hiding behind red shields, exploding cigars for area denial, and a grappling hook that handles both traversal and combat reach. The weapon-switching logic does create awkward moments: the revolver only fires forward, blue-shielded enemies demand melee, and you cannot crouch to dodge incoming fire. Those three restrictions stack on each other in the worst way during busy encounters, forcing you into point-blank range at exactly the moment you least want to be there. On PC the frame rate holds steady through dense encounters, which is welcome. The controls have no custom binding, only three presets, and none of them feel totally right if you are coming from a keyboard-and-mouse background. Controller is the clear intended input and the game plays cleanly on a pad for the most part. The bigger performance complaint is enemy hit-sponge behaviour: too many standard grunts absorb way more shots than the encounter pacing can afford, and that problem gets amplified by bosses that occasionally spike the difficulty with bullet-hell patterns the earlier levels never train you for. Checkpoints are generous and there are no lives to worry about, but checkpoints do not persist between sessions, so closing the game mid-level means starting that level over. Local two-player co-op is included and works fine in broad strokes, though the camera locks to Player One, meaning Player Two can get pushed offscreen and killed if the lead moves too aggressively. That quirk aside, the co-op makes the harder encounters noticeably more manageable and adds replay value to a game that solo runs at roughly six to eight hours. Cutscenes are pulled directly from the original anime, which gives the whole thing a cohesive pulp sci-fi tone that a lesser licensed game would have spent half a budget trying to fake. If you have never watched a frame of the 1982 series, that context is not required but the story does spoil the first twelve episodes, so factor that in. Bottom line on whether to buy it now: it is a competent, sometimes fun run-and-gun with a signature mechanic that stands on its own, let down by enemy design decisions that drag out fights past the point of fun. The audience is narrower than the AAA tag implies. Cobra fans get a faithful ride. Run-and-gun regulars get a decent, if flawed, afternoon. Everyone else should try the free Steam demo first.

Fred · Scout Team

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