Comit in Cosmo Knights Revenge - Review

Another look at an indie release from this year, Comit is a side-scrolling platformer with an interesting twist too it. Comit, the character you control, is able to perform a dash in any direction. The kicker is that there is no limit too how often you can do it, so you are able to keep yourself constantly moving without ever touching the ground. You can do that as well as a basic double jump.

That brief description describes the core of the gameplay and the primary reason to play the game, especially since there is no story beyond 'Hunt down the bad guy'. With some pretty basic art design, everything in this game hinges on how well that one aspect works out. That leaves really only two things to discuss, the stages themselves and the boss fights.

The stages themselves, with one exception, are almost entirely open. There are obstacles in the form of enemies, floating spiky ball things, and floor/wall spikes. The thing is though if all you are doing is reaching the end, everything is largely ignorable. You can easily beat every stage in under a minute, that time being generous, with no issue. The question here comes with how much do you like collecting things and trying to achieve a high score by the end of the level.

There are two reasons to search around beyond that, specifically permanent health upgrades and extra lives, which come into play mostly in the final stage of the game. Even then that just means you need to find the moon, and more likely then not there are so many stars (Collect 100 for an extra life), that you are pretty much guaranteed to have more than enough lives. The last stage, in contrast to all the rest, takes place in a much more narrow hall for of traps, and it is a long level that must be completed in one go. Despite controls feeling the same, it feels like an entirely different game. While not too hard if you've gained a good number of lives and a few health upgrades, it does take a while to get used to the change in how you have to play.

The boss fights, on the other hand, are almost laughably pointless. Each world has three stages, the final one being the boss fight. Each boss requires you to dash into them while avoiding attacks, the problem being that none of the attacks are at all hard to avoid. Each one ends up being a quick and engaging fight before moving on to the next world.

I will note the game has a 'Speed Run' mode, but as of writing this review, it isn't working. The Developer responded to me, and he said he knew what the issue was but couldn't fix it until this weekend. So While the mode is there, It's not taken into consideration for this review.

The core gameplay loop is pretty basic and is really only going to be appealing if you like wracking up scores and flying around, so for me there wasn't really a whole lot here to get me interested. That said, the actual core of the design philosophy is fine if a bit overly simplistic. While I think it would be a better game with more intricate boss fights and more levels along the line of the last one, the game does well enough being a bit of a mindless collecting and score based game. If the game was more then three dollars I'd definitely say give it a hard pass because of this, but if you want a bit of mindless collection to fill out the time it's not a bad one to go with while waiting on some bigger releases.