Cobra Mission: Panic In Cobra City is an adult RPG game developed by INOS and published by Megatech Software. The player takes on the role of J.R., a private investigator, as he tries to find a friend of his former school friend and past flame. Who had gone missing without any warning and under suspicious circumstances not long before his arrival. Along the way, the player will meet various girls and be 'rewarded' for helping them solve their problems. Cobra Mission was one of the very first 'eroge' or erotic games to ever be translated and released to the English-speaking market.
After reading some of the reviews that this game received around its time of release, I was led to believe that this game was an absolute shocker and for all the wrong reasons. Being a new genre for the 'gaijin' or 'foreigner' in English, this game was a trailblazer in its own way and opened the path for a completely new type of game that is very well known today. So when I loaded it up, I thought that I was going to hate playing this game and didn't really have an open mind. Yet after I managed to get to grips with the controls and gameplay of this title, I found myself actually enjoying it. It literally plays just like a standard, old skool JRPG, but with boobies! I will freely admit that the controls take some time to get used to and are far from intuitive, but once you get them down, there is quite a good little game here. I loved the scripting for the girls and the ways that they interact with the player character. The humour is 90's cheese but oddly works pretty well, though not so much if you are easily offended. The pacing was a little hit and miss, and I found that the level grinding was a little excessive but not terrible. I liked the plot and found that it worked well for this game; it was not Oscar-worthy but was okay and easy to follow. I thought that it had an alright amount of adult content, and I liked the way that the sex scenes were implemented into this game. Again, they were nothing amazing, but they weren't nearly as bad as I was led to believe.
Visually, this game is a little bit of an eyesore and uses extremely contrasting colours that can be painful after a long play session. There were a lot of bright colours on blank white backgrounds, and this made reading the texts quite unpleasant at times, requiring frequent breaks to manage. The sex scenes weren't terrible, but again, the colouring could be something of an issue. For the most part, the visuals were very anime/comic book-like, and while I liked that, I'm certain that some would not. I also found that the lack of any actual animations or even close-ups of penetration and such sort of scuffed the game for me. The most that you would get was an image of a nude woman, but cutoff before the vagina was visible. I know that this was a purposeful choice by the developers, but it hurt the game, in my opinion. The general gameplay visuals were also rather aggressive on the eyes, and I found that the repeated textures made moving around the larger areas quite hard. I couldn't tell whether I was moving in the right direction or not more than once. The menus, user interfaces, and inventory screens were okay in my mind; they were clear and laid out in a way that didn't clutter the screen too much. I liked the girls portraits when talking to them and thought that they had a lot more effort put into them than most of the rest of the game. The movement animations were okay and reminded me a lot of Pokemon Red, which was an interesting moment of nostalgia for me. The bosses looked pretty cool, and the ending was pretty nice to look at too.
Overall, it was a game that I liked a lot and very much enjoyed playing, but had to nibble away at in small sessions due to the harsh visuals. I would say that it is worth a play, but if you're looking for ground-breaking gameplay and story-telling, you could do better.
== TAGS ==
Nudity / Partial Nudity / Strong Sexual Themes / Explicit Texts / Sex Toys / Depictions Of Sex / Depictions Of Rape / Oral / Vaginal / Creampie /
7/10 – Nearly There!
Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ
After reading some of the reviews that this game received around its time of release, I was led to believe that this game was an absolute shocker and for all the wrong reasons. Being a new genre for the 'gaijin' or 'foreigner' in English, this game was a trailblazer in its own way and opened the path for a completely new type of game that is very well known today. So when I loaded it up, I thought that I was going to hate playing this game and didn't really have an open mind. Yet after I managed to get to grips with the controls and gameplay of this title, I found myself actually enjoying it. It literally plays just like a standard, old skool JRPG, but with boobies! I will freely admit that the controls take some time to get used to and are far from intuitive, but once you get them down, there is quite a good little game here. I loved the scripting for the girls and the ways that they interact with the player character. The humour is 90's cheese but oddly works pretty well, though not so much if you are easily offended. The pacing was a little hit and miss, and I found that the level grinding was a little excessive but not terrible. I liked the plot and found that it worked well for this game; it was not Oscar-worthy but was okay and easy to follow. I thought that it had an alright amount of adult content, and I liked the way that the sex scenes were implemented into this game. Again, they were nothing amazing, but they weren't nearly as bad as I was led to believe.
Visually, this game is a little bit of an eyesore and uses extremely contrasting colours that can be painful after a long play session. There were a lot of bright colours on blank white backgrounds, and this made reading the texts quite unpleasant at times, requiring frequent breaks to manage. The sex scenes weren't terrible, but again, the colouring could be something of an issue. For the most part, the visuals were very anime/comic book-like, and while I liked that, I'm certain that some would not. I also found that the lack of any actual animations or even close-ups of penetration and such sort of scuffed the game for me. The most that you would get was an image of a nude woman, but cutoff before the vagina was visible. I know that this was a purposeful choice by the developers, but it hurt the game, in my opinion. The general gameplay visuals were also rather aggressive on the eyes, and I found that the repeated textures made moving around the larger areas quite hard. I couldn't tell whether I was moving in the right direction or not more than once. The menus, user interfaces, and inventory screens were okay in my mind; they were clear and laid out in a way that didn't clutter the screen too much. I liked the girls portraits when talking to them and thought that they had a lot more effort put into them than most of the rest of the game. The movement animations were okay and reminded me a lot of Pokemon Red, which was an interesting moment of nostalgia for me. The bosses looked pretty cool, and the ending was pretty nice to look at too.
Overall, it was a game that I liked a lot and very much enjoyed playing, but had to nibble away at in small sessions due to the harsh visuals. I would say that it is worth a play, but if you're looking for ground-breaking gameplay and story-telling, you could do better.
== TAGS ==
Nudity / Partial Nudity / Strong Sexual Themes / Explicit Texts / Sex Toys / Depictions Of Sex / Depictions Of Rape / Oral / Vaginal / Creampie /
7/10 – Nearly There!
Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ