A Binge Gamer Review: Cogs
Psssst…We’re giving away a copy of Cogs to one luck reader. Check out this post.
Do you remember that game Pipe Dream? Well, I’m pretty sure it got drunk one night and conceived a love child with a Rubik’s Cube. And that child grew up to smoke a lot of crack. The result? Cogs.
Cogs was made by the indy game developers at Lazy 8 Studios and is available on Steam for just $9.99 (they’ve also go a free demo on there). Let me start off by telling you what Cogs is not:
- pretentious
- irritating
- mind-blowing
The basic concept is that you have to build and manipulate machines by sliding tiles around a board. Sometimes the board is 3D. Sometimes the board is two-sided. Sometimes you’re slinging pipes to pump air. Sometimes you’re sliding gears to turn wheels. It’s really a pretty simple concept - but done EXTREMELY well. This video explains it better than I ever could:
What I absolutely love about Cogs is that there’s no pretentious story to get in the way. Some puzzle games (an example would be World of Goo or Zack and Wiki) can support a story. It makes sense. How many times, though, have you started to play an indy game, thinking there was actually some meat to it, only to find that it is really just a rehashed puzzle game where the story is just a second thought? I know it has happened to me many times. Guess what? A good game doesn’t NEED a story to make it work. Just look at Tetris.
And the good people who made Cogs seem to understand this. When you’re playing the game, you’re completely immersed in the mechanical world they’ve created, but they haven’t tacked on some stupid tale to give reason to each level. No princess to rescue, no world to save. You’re playing to win. The end.
I’ve also mentioned that the game isn’t irritating. With puzzle games, you run two risks: 1) you make the game too hard or 2) you make the game too easy. It’s the Goldilocks conundrum - a video game isn’t good unless the difficulty level is JUST RIGHT, and with such a simple puzzle game, that’s hard to do. Cogs gives users three different ways to play, though. You can just work on solving the puzzles, you can for time trials, or you can play to complete the puzzle in as few moves as possible. You can also customize things to make the game more or less challenging so that you don’t get frustrated. Trust me, some of these puzzles are NOT easy - but I think the longest I spent on one level was about 10 minutes, and that was because I really had it FUBAR’ed from the start.
With all this praise, you may be running out to download Cogs right now. Before you do, though, make sure you understand that this game is not mind-blowing. If you’re more of a Halo person than a Hexic person, you’re going to get bored with this game, and fast. To be honest, it isn’t a game that I can sit and play for hours on end, and I do really like puzzle games. Every level is so different, yet, with the continuous same concept, it starts to get monotonous. There are a TON of levels (50, which you can play in each mode), and I think I would have rather seen multi-part puzzles that took longer to solve than level after level after level.
What I can’t criticize is the artwork and audio. A+ job, seriously. This game could have looked and sounded really cheap, but it doesn’t. You can tell they put a lot of effort it making a really clean product, and I definitely respect that. If I’m going to spend $10 on a casual puzzle game, I don’t want something that looks like it was slapped together.
So, bottom line, should you buy cogs? If you’re into puzzle games and want something new and interesting, yes. If you’re expecting the next Braid, no. I highly recommend trying out the demo, and if it holds your interest, purchase the full game. OR you can go to THIS POST to learn about how you can win a free copy from Lazy 8 Studios - exclusively for Binge Gamer readers!
