Cobalt Core

well, it's great too. i LOVE the music. love the art and the animal characters. i really enjoy the dialogue - seriously, i rarely laugh at games, but a solid chunk of the dialogue made me audibly chuckle. it's snappy, doesn't overstay its welcome. i am very intrigued by the concept of taking 3 characters and only seeing cards from their specific decks, which all focus on different things. not taking the 1st character, the shield guy, did feel like a bit of a death sentence, but maybe as i get better (and unlock more characters) i'll feel more comfortable experimenting with more out-there and aggressive character combos

as for replayability?

well, that's hard to say... it depends on how much the game opens up as i get further in. the game isn't terribly hard, which i actually enjoy for casual runs. plus, i haven't tried any difficulty above normal yet. but once i get good at the game, i could see it feeling too easy and too samey. while combat itself - positioning, blocking - is really fun and strategic and demands attention, stuff like deckbuilding, routing, setting up synergies, etc aren't really big factors, at least that's how it feels to me 5 hours in. usually its easy to tell what the correct choice of card is, there don't seem to be many complex synergies. making correct choices during events is easy too, and not extremely impactful either. routing doesn't feel too impactful. in sts you'd be screaming when you accidentally route yourself into an elite that you can't handle, or sighing with relief when you're low health and there's a rest site coming up soon. in cobalt core i don't get that feeling. to be clear, those criticisms aren't really "negatives". i don't find myself "annoyed" at "lame" events or anything. all the aspects i talked about are still fun enough, and none of them detract from the main star of the show - the combat. i just see how good the game already is, and how much potential it has, and how good a game like sts is, and it makes me imagine the possibilities. that's all!

The soundtrack is fantastic and the art style is up my alley.

The soundtrack is fantastic and the art style is up my alley.

wow. i'm very used to trying new games thinking "this is totally something i would love" and then bouncing off of it within an hour. while i was of course going to give it a fair shot, in the back of my head i was assuming cobalt core would share the same fate. the first day i got it i played it for a few hours straight, and i'm honestly expecting it to enter the "steam deck roadtrip classics" lineup alongside slay the spire 2 and balatro