A blast from the past that we didn’t remotely expect
Space Adventure Cobra is a manga and anime that you probably haven’t seen. The manga is late 70s Post-Star Wars era space opera cool guy adventures, and the anime (with movie!) is from the mid 80s and ran for 31 episodes — and all of this left a lasting impact on pop culture that you may not even realize. Fast forward decades later and Microids resurrects it with a video game adaption that I’m surprised even exists, but here we are!
Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening is hand drawn stylized 2D run-and-gun action platformer that’s more Mega Man than Metroidvania but has fingers in both pots (although it’s level-based, so less Metroidvania than we’d probably like).
In the game we play as Cobra, going out on a variety of space adventures. Cobra as a character faked his death and brainwashed himself so that he would stop being hunted down by a fraternity of space pirates that he screwed over. As the “show” starts he begins regaining his memories and learns of his past, which is a great way to work in the gaining of powers in the game. There are moments where he will sometimes remember an ability at just the right time with an “oh yeah, I can do this” realization and it’s corny but it works.
Cobra has two iconic things that must be there if we’re going to adapt him correctly: Lady Armaroid, his sexy robot partner, and his psychogun. The gun is his arm, like Samus or Mega Man (and also directly inspired the prosthetic arm on Guts from Berserk), and in this game we can charge and even fire and direct the blast in slow motion through several enemies and to solve puzzles. The game is far from perfect; Cobra’s jump is kinda awful to deal with and there is just a lot going on that it’s a pain to manage all of the mechanics all of the time, but at the end it’s all just perfectly fine without doing anything particularly exciting in the space.
Didn’t watch Cobra and interested in this? No worries! This game has taken a straightforward approach of adapting the first 12 episodes of the series complete with the cutscenes being those taken directly from the show. It’s a crash course in the character, one that has been lost to time but so subtley influential, and with an experience that’s “good enough” it’s not a bad way to dip our toes in and find out more.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher.
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