Cobra

Gun in hand, face stretched like a cobweb, and goal simple: shoot as many enemies as possible before they take you down. Cobra is a platformer packed with action, where sometimes it forgets to be fun, but when it clicks, it hurts good.

I'm playing a conveniently unnamed faceless agent who must sweep enemies from various missions. It's a side-scrolling action platformer made by someone who just watched the first Rambo film and decided they could do it better on PC than the director. There are a couple level-killers: in each one you're either stuck under a ceiling that gradually lowers, or between bunkers, and enemies and bullets constantly pour at you. The goal is simple: run left, run right, jump, shoot, and try not to look smart about it.

The controls have that stiff construction typical of seventies and eighties PC games. Movement works, shooting works, jumping works, but combining them often feels like controlling a recycled robot. Worst are the moments when you need to land precisely on a platform while shooting—you usually end up fallen with the feeling it was the game's fault, not yours. Bullets fly like crazy, health is measured in one-hit-and-done, and levels aren't long, so failing means replaying the same chunk over and over. That's either addictive or frustrating, depending on your mood and caffeine levels.

Cobra is interesting as a snapshot from when action games were built on the principle of "as many enemies as possible and as little mercy as we can manage." The graphics are rough but readable, the sound is plasticky and weird, and the whole project smells of the nineties pretending to be the eighties. The game won't land on any classics list, but it's got a certain punch that got left behind somewhere.

These days I play it more from nostalgia and curiosity about what the limits of PC gaming looked like without a big budget. It's definitely not a game you'll play endlessly, but as a historical snapshot of how arcade games were made on home computers, it has its place. It emulates easily, deaths come quick and without feeling, and honestly, that's just fine.