Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure

Another one of Apogee's platformers, among the lesser known ones. There was no smooth scrolling yet, so you get tile scrolling like in Duke Nukem 1, although the graphics here look more detailed and there's actual music (sound effects are still limited to PC Speaker though, which sounds okay in Dosbox but gets annoying very soon on real hardware). Unfortunately, with more detailed graphics, the lack of smooth scrolling becomes much more noticeable than in Duke Nukem 1. Between the cutesy story and colorful backgrounds, it sounds like the game was aimed at children, but by god, is this thing brutal. The excessive zoom doesn't help at all, but some later levels would still be ridiculous even in other games. The first episode, which is probably the one most people played as it was shareware, is easy enough. But from the second episode, the difficulty ramps up a lot, with enemies just outside of your view range thatwill inevitably hit you during a jump. It gets to the point where it feels harder than Monster Bash. And your health doesn't even refill at the start of a level. Kids might have enjoyed this in its day, but I wonder how many people actually finished it. There are far better platformers out there.

Graphics: Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure is bright and cheerful, until it suddenly isn't. Using a 3 layer parallax, 16 color EGA graphics, it manages to look quite advanced for the era, in many ways while looking delightfully dated in others. However, this also is a detriment, in that many of the later areas are incredibly busy in the background, to the detriment of being unable to tell platform from background. This is especially prevalent in the second episode. Sound & Music: Bobby Prince provides the adlib music in his typical colorful way, while the PC speaker provides sounds that are often deep and sweeping. My only suggestion is to use the MIXER command to adjust the volume down a bit. Control: This is where things become a little complicated. Cosmo himself moves 8 pixels at one time, which is a very large stride compared to contemporary games. As such, precision movement is all but veritably impossible. Of note, this is also where Cosmo’s standout feature comes to mind. His hands which are suction cups, allow him to cling to walls. This is easy enough to activate, but doesn’t work on icy surfaces very well. Difficulty: This is where the game takes the most points off. It starts out rather easily, but due to a combination of many factors, it ceases to be reasonable 3 levels in. Factors such as poor lead distance between the player character and the camera, the aforementioned controls, enemy placement, (often being just off screen or out of reach) and deliberate design decisions. Overall, I commend the programmers for making the game, but I cannot say the level design is fair. Give it a try with the shareware episode first, and if you enjoy it, enjoy 27 levels of platforming & pouncing.

The first episode is easy, but the first few levels of the 2nd episode are filled with death traps. can't recommend anyone buying this game at all... It's just not fun past the shareware stuff, which is free to play on the web, even today.. I'll keep the game, because returning it (or attempting to) is a real pain.

I remember buying a shareware 3.5" disk version of this years ago. I LOVED this game. This is a very solid Apogee platformer. I thought it had good design, nice, bright, cheery graphics and good non annoying sound (some platformers back during this time frame tended to have a stupidly annoying sound). Might have to pick this up since I never could afford the full version back when this first came out...

Commander Keen get a lot of love, and rightly so, but Cosmo seems to fly under the radar. This platformer is excellent and anyone that liked Keen should absolutely play this game.