In the ’80s, there were some odd and campy anime shows that were on the edge of what would have forced an adult rather than teen rating, yet remained as titillating as possible. Most of these shows have now fallen into complete obscurity, in part because they really weren’t mainstream in the first place. But in all honesty, they haven’t exactly aged that well.
Against this backdrop emerges Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening, based on the anime show by the same name. Among its fans it has reached cult status, and it is not difficult to see why. The art style is stellar and lives and breathes its decade’s vibes, seamlessly mixing the sci-fi and sword-and-sorcery fantasy genres that were popular at the time. The question is, will this live up to the legacy? Read on as Cubed3 helms the Turtle and takes off into space as the space pirate Cobra!
For anime shows to get a game adaptation in 2025, few would have guessed one of them would be Space Adventure Cobra, a show that has over forty years on its neck. It is always fun to see old shows get some love and recognition. Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening is both a game and a new adaptation of the classic ’80s anime, as it is filled with lovely cutscenes that truly capture the feeling of its era. It is interesting how the developer has entwined the gameplay with these cutscenes. There are quite a few issues, however.
The most prominent problem affects the player right from the start of gameplay. After the lovely opening scene which really draws from the past, the player is immediately hit with a massive sense of anachronism. This features a graphical style reminiscent of titles made in the late 2010s, and it sadly feels very lifeless and stale compared to the cutscenes. While it might not be fair to compare the visuals to what could be passed off as old-school anime scenes, to maintain the era’s feel this could have taken the path many other retro games have: pixel art.
The character models are just not that interesting to look at, and sadly, most enemies look incredibly similar. This is a problem that bleeds into the gameplay as it sometimes makes it difficult to tell which enemy will attack in which way. Well, maybe “could have” is the correct term here. There are far greater flaws with combat that render it a non-problem because of one broken mechanic. The homing shot.
The homing shot is a broken, yet required skill. It simply stops time, allowing one to guide a strong bullet along a path and hit all enemies in its way. While it has a slight cooldown, its very short, and the distance the bullet travels is quite long. The result of this is that it is rarer for an enemy to ever share the screen with Cobra outside of closed room battles, making most of the game’s combat trivial even on the highest difficulty level.
What makes the homing shot necessary is two-fold. The first part is that some bosses and enemies simply can’t be killed by any other means. The second is more diabolical and goes into one of the absolutely most significant game design flaw: the level design, especially in later stages. Τhe first couple are fun and at times quite challenging in just the right way for being at the beginning. Even on the highest difficulty level, it just leaves enough of a struggle to keep you returning for more. It feels fair and that every death is the your own fault. Later on in the adventure, it turns into an entirely different story.
The level design becomes extremely lazy, mixing up straight-up empty corridors with nothing at all happening, with some really annoying maze-like designs. Those things just make them annoying, but what takes it to the next level is how many random out-of-nowhere traps there are. It sometimes feels like the developer took inspiration from infamous troll levels in Super Mario Maker and decided that this is what challenging gameplay looks like. That is where the homing bullet comes in. Often, Space Adventure Cobra relies on leaps of faith. Sometimes the jump leads to death, other times not, and it is not rare to be impossible to tell which is the case. Then the homing bullet is the only solution to avoid having to return to the last checkpoint, as it covers such a distance and shows the player what is coming up. It does not make the experience more challenging, just a lot more tedious.
The issue is so glaring just because the first couple of levels show such confident level design with well-designed challenges and strong, fair platforming segments, setting the expectations high. If this review was just about the first five or so stages, there would be nothing to complain about in terms of level design.
One area where Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening truly excels, though, are the boss battles. Each feel unique, engaging and mechanically heavy in a way that makes one first try to figure out how to damage the boss in a very playful and non-punishing way. Death puts Cobra straight back into action. That right there is good, challenging, and complex design. No artificial difficulty. As a result, whenever Cobra dies to a boss fight, the wonderful feeling of it being one’s own fault is right there. It also gives such a rewarding feeling whenever the player wins, rather than making them feel punished for not being able to predict that jumping at a specific spot would make a random statue fall down and instantly kill Cobra, sending them back several minutes to the last checkpoint.
Sadly Space Adventure Cobra is also filled with glitches. Some are pretty fun and harmless, but others are straight-up game-breaking. One of the more fun glitches is one that allows Cobra to perform a jump and a dash midair if he dashes while launching the homing shot. It is quite a precise little glitch, but with practice, even a casual player can pull it off regularly and skip entire puzzles and large segments. These sorts of glitches are not a problem. They are very fun to play around with and can make you feel clever for solving things in unintended ways. What is a problem, though, are bugs that softlock the game or similar.
There is one very nasty glitch where if Cobra dies right as an automatic movement section part starts, he gets stuck moving in that direction even after death, being uncontrollably running towards his death over and over again until the player restarts the entire level. Another nasty problem is that in one boss fight, the boss literally can not die if this is set on the highest difficulty level. The boss health goes down to zero life as normal, but for some reason, it does not die, no matter how many times it takes damage. The only solution is to lower the difficulty level and restart the fight.
Time to take a moment here to answer one question: does the source material survive the test of time? It is questionable to be brutally fair. While the art style is beautiful and Cobra is charmingly cocky in just the right way to feel… ’80s in the best way imaginable, some relics of the era reek an awful lot. The most prominent problem is how extremely sexualised every single woman in the game is. Literally everyone wears little else than a bikini, and there is a lot of objectifying partial nudity.
While nudity and sexual content in itself isn’t a bad thing and can, if done correctly, even elevate media, the way Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening handles it feels sleazy. To take the most outrageous example: In one of the stages, Cobra has to fight a bar full of strippers who have been brainwashed by one of the villains by him implanting his seed. We all know what this is an allegory for; there is no need to pretend that anything else is the case. It isn’t the only case ever when the writing goes really south just to add in some very misogynistic sexual content that was sadly far too common during that era.
This isn’t helped at all that sexualisation and objectification of women are a common theme in the game. Even powerful women in the story become completely helpless the moment Cobra enters their life, make him either have to save or avenge them if they get killed. To be frank, this is a massive issue with the source material as well, which is often worse than the game. It is, however, something that could have been adapted better to fit more into today, as the game took quite a few not-so-great artistic liberties in other areas, such as the graphical style, to make it feel more modern. It isn’t as if the retro feel was considered sacred. Therefore, anything that remains is a stylistic choice.
It is oh-so easy, as someone who loves retro games and media in general, to want to love Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening. Still, it feels like for every success it achieves, it fails spectacularly with five other things. It is a mess, and it could have absolutely been helped by better playtesting, and either further embrace itself as a campy retro-inspired game, or to distance itself not just from the charming parts of it, but also the very problematic sexualisation common for the time.
