Recent reviews by LukeBu

It is already a great game at this point.
They didn't change anything to mess it up, which is what happens when franchises are this good.
Except when it comes to the whole not being able to pause on certain bosses issue.

Cobalt Core is an excellent card space battler rougelike-like, with strong FTL vibes and a cute animal asthetic. The ships and characters you unlock vastly change how the gameplay operates. Not all characrers and ships are created equal, but there are a lot of fun combos that work really well. Getting everything you can out of your deck, passives and proper positioning is very satisfying.

As a huge fan of DD:DA, with thousands of hours across multiple consoles, save files, and even multiple accounts to have a full party of my pawns, this sequel took me off guard a little.
At first I was paralyzed by my usual need to explore everything. I saw a game where I just wanted more of the same, but, instead it was imperfectly delivered. It made me very sad.
Menus weren't as convenient, camping, planning, and weight management, were taking up so much time, and I wasn't enjoying it. The game was filled with walking through goblin infested roads, trying to solve quests that sometimes broke in unexpected ways, and I even used a mod to get access to an item necessary to my pawn build, I accidentally locked myself out of my first playthrough. I was sad that they expanded the color system to allow for more classes, but only netted one more. I was hugely disappointed by this, and still am, mostly since the first game and expansion were so important to me.
I kept giving it a chance, and I'm glad I did.
I learned to look at it differently.
The combat is top notch, even if they unnecessarily lowered the max skills you can equip. The travel is interesting, even if not enough to keep me from using fast travel every time as promised. The inventory management is not as good as the first, and the changes they made did not help, but it is something I learned to deal with quicker, especially late game, mostly by changing equipment less. The late game event/ending was a unique and interesting way of spicing things up.
So while my feelings are very mixed, and I would make a lot of changes to this game,(enemy variety, better dungeons, inventory management, quest mechanics not being broken by nonsense in a few cases, more abilities on your bar for most classes, and wanting more classes) it is still really good.
My expectations were a little to high, but why shouldn't they be, Capcom is pretty awesome!

P.S. add optional multiplayer, even if I am just playing a pawn.
P.s.s. As a Steam Deck super tinkerer, it was very hard to get this to not run like ass most of the time on Steam Deck. It is much improved, but as far as I know no one else is even trying anymore. Even on my pc it seemed like it should run better. Please keep optimising it.

Great game! lots of fun with friends.
I'm a tad unhappy with the solo experience, post patch, and the fact that arrowhead doesn't test any of their updates before going live. Otherwise this is a fantastic, exciting game for a group of four.

Great co-op! It's a bit high stress, but it gets exciting quick!

Fix multiplayer so I can play with my friends and give this excellent game a good review please.
Waiting on player decision... player is also waiting...
Reset turn
Waiting on player decision... player is also waiting...
Reset turn.
repeat ad nauseam.

Its a great game. Its fun to build mechs, and its fun to blow stuff up. The other AC game I really got into is For Answer, so I compare these two a lot. The OS upgrades are not as interesting as tuning in AC4A. The build diversity is tiny compared to AC4A. You are required to touch the ground a lot more than AC4A, which is probably a good thing.
The builds can feel very different, but there is still some balance to be done to make all of the weapons have a strong niche. There is just enough here to make a lot of interesting builds, but I hope to see more added.
The stories and multiple endings were interesting and fun.
Getting all of the chests, logs, and S-ranks was a bit of a chore, but it was still fun, most of the time.
PvP is a bit random, but could be fun to make strategies if I had a team member.

DON'T MAKE LIVE SERVICE GAMES IF YOU CAN"T MAKE SERVERS WORK!

Pros:
+ Beautiful environments
+ Decent stealth mechanics
+ Decent story
+ Impactful combat
+ Doesn't replace important gameplay with QTE.

Cons:
- Huge info dump sequences with irrelevant flavor mixed in, making me want to skip most of it, but paranoid about missing the story.
- Disrespectful of your time. The inventory management, and crafting is mostly not fun, just busy work to get you to waste time hunting animals to get random drops to make bags bigger, and making arrows in a paused menu from thousands of ingredients when you run out.
- Leveling contains ways to reduce these annoyances, forcing you to play most of the game just getting slowly less annoyed, until you finally get minor stealth and combat bonuses in the endgame.

Overall I had good fun for under $10, lasting 32 hours. I skipped most of the side quests, as I was primarily interested in finishing the story, and felt that I was burning out of the gameplay, and I'm not interested in ng+ or finishing side quests after that.

Overall an enjoyable game.
The story was interesting, with a single choice that feels a bit less impactful than it should.
If you like hedge mazes, and labyrinthine cities, this game is for you.
The combat is excellent and fun, if a bit repetative. The leveling aspects seem slightly undercooked, leading to maxing out damage before the midpoint of the game. This leads to later content becoming trivially easy.
The game has a decent length, but enemy variety is adequate, but not varied enough to warrant new game plus.