Cortex Command
Developer: Data Realms
Nomination: Technical Excellence
Platform: Windows, Mac OSX
Website
Description: You play a disembodied brain with remote access to control zombie bodies and cool robots to do your bidding. Like all right-minded people, you use this power to look for gold and shoot people who get in your way.

Adam’s Thoughts: Cortex Command isn’t quite finished yet, but they have a playable build available. You can see what the developers are going for, though: a hybrid between strategy and platforming.  The unusual genre mixing lets the game keep the stakes high (death), without things getting out of hand (not your death). The fact that you jump into alternate bodies grants you a level of control that strategy games can’t offer. There’s a tremendous level of attention to detail too–your robot bodies are like little 16 bit ragdolls, and the game seems to dynamically figure out how those ragdolls will navigate through the environment. It looks like procedurally-generated animation, and it really gives the sense that your avatars are moving through space. Wrapping all that up into a word, Cortex Command is ambitious.

Sadly, the mechanics are still pretty rough, and that keeps this early build from shining. The controls are touchy, so your fragile avatars seem to have a fatal attraction to the ground. Enemies are natural crack shots too, so the developers’ ambition is offset by the gameplay’s frustrations. Cortex Command is an interesting idea, and hopefully it’ll grow more polished as it develops.

Katie’s Thoughts:
One of the things I remember from PAX is that Mike and Jerry (aka Tycho and Gabe) talked about how they had released footage of their game too soon, and it was a mistake. To them, who had been working on for a long time, saw a much more polished thing than the rest of us did, because they had seen it in its raw stages. And despite the many warnings both on Cortex Command’s website and within the game itself that this game is not yet finished, I fear that it was too early to make the game available already. Their game concept is really cool, and I was excited to sit down with it. Yet I couldn’t beat the tutorial. Not because the concept of the tutorial was too hard, but because I was too frustrated.

One of the amazing things about this game is that so many things are mutable: both land and bodies take damage and become deformed due to damage. Very cool idea. Except . . . it’s really easy to get stuck. Or to go for a gun and not realize you don’t have any arms left until it’s too late. Or to crash land your supply ship, killing everyone inside, costing you the precious gold you spent to get more bodies to send marching towards your opposition while the computer effortlessly jet packs down the access tunnel to destroy your brain. /cough . . . that happened to me a few times.

I love the premise, I like the graphics, but the game is still painful to play. I hope it comes together into something solid, but I’m always going to remember how frustrated I was trying to play it at this point in the game’s development.

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