Cosmic Rochambo

Game: Cosmic Rochambo

Developer: Sean Dick

Download Link: https://dean-sick.itch.io/cosmic-rochambo
MSRP: $5.00

I suck at keeping this thing active, but here goes nothing! HEY KIDDOS! DO YOU LIKE ANIME!? Yes, you do, you dorks. You can't go anywhere without finding something anime-inspired. It's like a disease with no cure! Okay, so that's a bit melodramatic, but still, so much of media nowadays has taken a ton of influence from Japanese animation, most notably, the shounen genre. Now, for all you non-fluent anime denizens who think all of anime is most likely a gateway to child pornography (that sounded a lot better in my head), shounen is a genre of Japanese media that mostly caters to adolescent boys. Most shounen anime or manga is usually something action-adventure related with epic battles on an over the top scale, so stuff like Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, My Hero Academia, One Piece, Bleach, Attack On Titan, the list goes on and on. So with my tirade of describing anime out of the way, you might be wondering what this has to do with the game at hand? Well, Cosmic Rochambo, and its sister game, Rebop Blasters take heavy influence from the shounen anime genre. I'll get to Rebop Blasters in a second, but I first want to discuss Cosmic Rochambo.

So the premise of this game is that you and your adversary are having a duel of epic proportions. You are fighting in space! Your controls are basic: if using a controller, you use your joystick or d-pad to move around and press any of the face buttons to perform a superpowered dash attack or tap to parry. Your goal is to beat and bang against your opponent until they hit the edge of the arena. Do this a set number of times and you win. There are multiple arenas to face-off in, such as a cube, a sphere, or a very large arena that in my opinion is super disorienting and I don't exactly recommend fighting in. You can choose the color of your fighter as well, and that's pretty much the gist of it.

I enjoy the presentation of this game. It's vibrantly colorful and pleasant to look at, though there could be too many effects for those photosensitive. The game definitely hits the vibe of being an epic battle in an alternate dimension where you're zooming around and fighting and martial art fisticuffs ala Dragon Ball Z. It's a cool multiplayer game that you can have couch co-op play with. I do kind of wish there were online capabilities with this game, but it's a good proof of concept.

If there is any sort of criticism I can throw at this game, it would probably be the functioning of the AI. The AI is kind of inconsistent with their difficulty setting, with, in my experience, easy being super aggressive and the hardest difficulty being fairly passive. The most you get out of their difficulty is when your dash attacks collide and you have to perform certain inputs to win the minigame. The harder the AI, the faster they perform the inputs. Speaking of which, when you get into these situations, I recommend using the D-pad for directional inputs, as the joystick is not always that responsive for those inputs

Despite some criticisms I have with the game, I did enjoy my time with it. I highly recommend giving it a shot and as I am writing this, the game is currently free to pick up off of itch.io, as they are having a COVID-19 quarantine sale across the site. Go nuts!