Cosmic Paradox: Noire – PS5 Review

Cosmic Paradox: Noire is a shoot ’em up from solo dev Aldo Slavic that appears to be the first in a series of games based around a storyline of two dimensions colliding and splintering time.  Details are scant at the moment though but at least we’ve got this game to be getting on with.

After a little bit of plot delivered through text, which kind of felt like meaningless sci-fi babble, you get into the game itself.  And what a strange game this one is.  Not so much for the gameplay, this is a pretty standard shoot ’em up with a persistent upgrade mechanic, but for some of the strange choices it makes along the way.

As with any other vertically-aligned shoot ’em up, you’re at the bottom and waves of enemies come in from the top of the screen trying to shoot you.  You move the ship with the d-pad/left stick and you fire your only weapon with R2 (yep, no smart bombs or other tech here).  To Slavic’s credit though the R2 trigger takes advantage of the DualSense’s haptics with a good, chunky bit of feedback when you shoot.  You may as well just hold down the trigger though as there’s never really a reason to not be shooting as your accuracy is never measured and enemy appearances are randomised so you never know where they are about to emerge from.

Aside from that you also have a couple of abilities that occasionally drop from defeated enemies:  a ‘Rampage’ upgrade that speeds up your fire rate for a few seconds and a similarly temporary shield that you use to ram enemies (stupidly, it disables your main gun).

The enemies themselves tend to show up in waves of three or four and then fire very sporadically in your direction.  It’s definitely not what you’d call exciting and instead feels more like playing one of those duck shooting games in a fairground in the ’80s.  Occasionally, a heavier enemy will show up who’ll take a few more seconds and shots to defeat.  The game calls these bosses but they’re not quite that grand.

After all the waves have come and gone, that’s the end of the level and you’ll be a third of the way through the game.  Yep, there are just three levels and enemy durability aside they all play exactly the same.  This was especially apparent for us as we had to upgrade a couple of times after failing the first level a few times initially.  We upgraded our gun damage (you can also do your hull strength, mobility and the durations for the shield and Rampage upgrade) and that got us through the level.  After that we were able to max out our damage and that was us good for the remaining two stages.

Once you’ve beaten the game, all that is left to do is play the Survival Mode for each stage.  Now you’d think that’d just be a mode that sees you playing for as long as you can until you die or something but no, it’s just the same thing as the main level.  It ends at the same time.  It plays exactly the same.  It looks and feels exactly the same too.  There might be some modification to the scoring or something but scoring is so irrelevant in this game (there are no leaderboards so who really cares about the score?) that it just makes this mode entirely redundant.  Not that it mattered, we cleared each one on the first attempt anyway.

If you’re after the Platinum trophy, all that’s left to do is buy all the upgrades and other ships (none of which makes much of a difference to anything) and that’s that.  Everything done in an hour with no reason to ever go back.  It’s a shame really as you get the feeling there’s a little bit of passion behind this project but it’s so plainly executed that it almost feels like shovelware at times.

Even the visuals are odd.  Some of the ship designs are quite nice but they’re done in that flat 2D style that makes everything look like a polished Flash game from fifteen years ago.  Also, you’re in a ship, in space, but the backgrounds don’t scroll.  They are animated a little so at least they aren’t static but they make everything feel so staid.  It makes this more of a Space Invaders/Galaga type of affair than an actual vertically-scrolling sort of shooter but even those games had a lot more action than Cosmic Paradox and that’s weird to say of Space Invaders given that it’s the dullest of all the classic-era coin ops.  Compare this to something like Galaga ’88 and it really does feel unexciting.

In the end we’re just not sure what Cosmic Paradox is trying to achieve.  It’s got a story to tell but tells it in the least exciting way possible, it promises a space battle but in the end feels like target practise against an alien force that would struggle to invade the home stand at a Leeds United game and it’s got a Survival Mode that just doesn’t make any sense.  It’s just so very underpowered and we don’t get it.  Why is it so short?  Why is it so tame?  Shoot ’em ups used to be like this on home computers back when they had 48k of memory to play with but we’re playing this on a PS5 and it feels like you could have easily played this on an Amiga and have been disappointed with your purchase.