I love it when a game takes an established formula and puts a distinctive, creative new spin on it. Such is the case with Cosmo Player Z, a new Switch release from developer Sommit Games and publisher Regista. I expected a competent but unobtrusive game when I first looked at it – but after playing for a while it became clear that, while rough around the edges, this game is a real gem worth adding to your library to add.
If Cosmo Player Z looks a little familiar, it’s because it originated as an iOS game and was then ported to PC in early 2022. However, don’t be put off by the mobile origin; while there’s certainly a touch of “mobile gate-jank” about the game – nothing that a few patches can’t fix – the core gameplay is extremely solid and, as noted, offers an original and interesting take on an established formula.
In Cosmo Player Z, you take on the role of Yuniko Crawford, a fighter for the Republican army, subordinate to a rather perverted take on Mega Man’s Dr. light. It’s up to you to lead Yuniko through a campaign that spans across different planets, take down the cute girl heads of various rebellions, and generally cause a ton of hell while looking good.
This is not a game where plot matters, remember; most of the dialogue in the game is to introduce new enemy characters or explain the game mechanics. There is a strong emphasis on mechanics here, and the game expands as you progress through the many stages.
The basic formula of Cosmo Player Z is that a single planet is split into multiple phases, which in turn are split into 21 sub-phases each. In each substage, which is presented from a top-down perspective, Yuniko simply has to take out all the enemies in order to continue. Every few substages there’s a chance to heal or get free upgrades, and the 21st substage offers a boss fight against a giant version of an enemy you’ve fought before, or a unique enemy to figure out its attack patterns.
So far, so straight forward. Where Cosmo Player Z gets interesting is that rather than adopting the twin-stick shooter formula you’d expect from this sort of setup, it instead uses quite different mechanical conventions that presumably stemmed from the desire of the developer to make it playable with a single finger on a phone’s touchscreen.
Yuniko shoots automatically, but nothing but when she stands still. That means you have to move to avoid enemies and their projectiles, but specifically stop move if you want to attack. Not only that, but her auto-targeting system automatically prioritizes the closest enemy, so you’ll need to position yourself tactically if you want to pick your enemies in a specific order – which is often advisable, as some are significantly more dangerous than others.
After clearing a substage in Cosmo Player Z, Yuniko gains gold and experience. When she level up from the last one, she can choose one of three skills to use for the rest of the general phase. These include adding elemental affinities to her base shot, adding rotating satellites with different elemental affinities, and adding floating ‘sub-weapons’ that track and attack her independently – including while she’s moving. There are also simpler passive increases to things like her max health, attack speed, and attack power.
If this sounds a bit “roguelite”-ish, that wouldn’t be a terrible comparison – although there are no randomly generated stages in Cosmo Player Z. However, you start each stage at level 1, meaning you can run through a stage very differently then the next, depending on the upgrades you choose while you’re at it – and the upgrades the game’s internal RNG makes available to you at any given time.
As you progress through the game, a wider variety of upgrades will become available for Yuniko to choose from at each higher level, and many of these will combine to produce more powerful skill combos. For example, if you acquire satellites from all four major elements, the resulting skill combination will result in a number of significantly more powerful rotating rainbow satellites that deal hefty damage and inflict multiple status effects on enemies.
In addition, each skill you choose determines the costume Yuniko wears on her head, body, and legs. To get the best possible rating for a stage, not only do you need to clean it up as quickly as possible and take as little damage as possible, you also need to coordinate her outfit – ideally by making sure she clears the entire stage in all three parts of the same outfit.
Fortunately, this task is made a little easier by the individual outfits that correspond to the various elemental abilities, but the “fashion” bonus does mean that you need to think carefully about the order in which you accept upgrades, or which upgrades you choose after you’ve completed an upgrade. put together a complete outfit.
Sometimes choosing the fashion bonus means deliberately missing out on the opportunity to put together skill combinations or acquire particularly powerful abilities – although it’s worth noting that you only need to worry about this if you’re up for the best ratings (and biggest gold bonuses) goes. for each stage. If your only goal is to just go through all the stages, you can take whatever approach you need.
The gold you acquire during substages and as a bonus according to your ranking at the end of a full stage can be used to acquire “traits” in Cosmo Player Z’s skill tree between runs. These are mainly passive bonuses that increase things like attack power, attack speed and defensive skills, but there are a number of “special” spaces around the board that unlock new abilities or offer useful upgrades such as the ability to start a new run with a upgrade already present.
By adding traits to Yuniko’s abilities, she will gradually start each new phase of Cosmo Player Z with extra power, which in turn makes it easier to go back to previous phases and get better ratings. And that’s how you work your way through the game, completing stages, unlocking new skills and getting stronger.
It’s a simple format, but it works extremely well, it offers a very engaging gameplay loop that you’ll want to keep coming back to – or spend several hours at a time on like I did when I first started playing !
There are a few nitpicks, which I suspect are mainly related to the game’s nature as a mobile port. Most notably, one of the main fonts used in the game is heavily contrived and difficult to read on larger screens; it looks a bit better in handheld mode, but the game would benefit a lot if it was replaced with a good high resolution font.
Also, and this is really a minor point, some of Yuniko’s occasional dialogue on the game’s main menu screen is cut off from the bottom of a text box, with seemingly no ability to scroll down. I’m guessing the scrolling feature on the original mobile version was tied to the touchscreen, but if you’re playing with a controller on Switch, there are some things Yuniko says that you just won’t see the end of.
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter because as noted earlier, this is a game where the mechanics are central. And that mechanics is very, very solid indeed. As long as you can handle the low budget presentation – the game is obviously built almost entirely with royalty-free assets – you can have a super fun arena shooter experience here. And, best of all, it doesn’t feel like another ripoff of Vampire Survivors, as good as many of them are!
Cosmo Player Z is now available for PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch.
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