The game was released on Steam Early Access on October 17th, 2017. It remains there today, but already features dozens of robot classes, each with unique behavior within the ecosystem, as well as multiple factions, some of which offer to help you and some of which are automatically hostile to everyone who approaches.
Cogmind contains examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Your main adversary. Also you and the Derelict bots, from the point of view of the Complex.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- If you run out of matter and need more to equip (or fire) a weapon, you can ram into other robots to have small amount of matter drop. This risks damaging yourself though.
- Enemies with weapons don't start out near where you enter a map. In easier difficulty modes, watchers that request reinforcements when they see you don't appear nearby either.
- If you go through a brutal fight that destroys most of your parts, you can often scavenge the remains of your opponents and/or find new parts nearby in order to keep going (even if your build might be totally different now).
- Anti-Grinding: You don't gain experience from killing enemy robots. If you linger on the later levels for too long, your alert level will rise, leading to increasingly aggressive assault squads.
- Bag of Holding: How your inventory works. At all times, you have a limited number of items that you can carry, but only parts currently attached to your core (ie not being carried in your inventory) count against your weight.
- Breakable Weapons: All weapons have a durability stat and break when it falls to zero.
- Brutal Bonus Level: The branches off of the final level.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: Cogmind could also be called Death Of A Thousand Cuts: The Game. Your core has a much higher strength than any of the enemies, to the point where it is literally impossible for anything to one-shot you or even kill you quickly (at least by roguelike standards). In practice, you'll usually die after attacks have destroyed all your parts, leaving you near-helpless enough for your enemies to finish wrecking your core.
- Dungeon Maintenance: If a battle causes collateral damage, robots will arrive to repair walls and clean up wreckage.
- Easily Detachable Robot Parts: A core feature is building and modifying yourself from the parts found, or remains of the defeated enemies.
- Everything Breaks: Every part of every robot (including yourself) can be destroyed, and the environment is fully destructible, too.
- Fragile Speedster: Swarmer bots, who are fast and difficult to hit, but very fragile.
- Giant Mook: Behemoth bots, which take up four tiles instead of one. Given that they use treads (the slowest propulsion system) and sport heavy weaponry, each of them is a Mighty Glacier, too.
- Heart Drive: Your core, which comes with a weak engine and weak hover propulsion. You'll still want to have parts equipped at all times, but even without them, you're not completely helpless.
- Made of Explodium: Reactors are a common sight in most levels of the Complex, and they will explode massively if sufficiently damaged. This is not terribly hard to accomplish with a stray shot or two, and - depending on your position and your enemies' position - that can end up being either useful or very, very bad.
- Mechanical Ecosystem: The Complex itself, and a major feature of the game. Each of the dozens of robot types has some purpose and agenda in this world, be it patrolling for intruders, guarding a location, scavenging debris, repairing damaged areas, hunting down known threats, or just surviving for its own sake.
- Mechanical Lifeforms: Basically everyone you meet.
- The Minion Master: Carrier bots have no weapons of their own, but deploy a squad of assault bots if they can close on your position.
- Mooks Ate My Equipment: Recyclers take equipment that you or destroyed robots drop, and put it in the recycling machines. More generally, any attack might destroy one of your parts if the part's durability is reduced to zero.
- Multiple Endings: There are seven different animated endings to uncover.
- Spread Shot: Flak cannons and multirails.
- Unknown Item Identification: Mostly done by wearing the item, though using faulty unknown items can damage your other equipment
- Upgrade Artifacts: Certain items found in side branches.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Not all of the Complex's robot minions are a threat to you. You can kill them to scavenge for parts or just for laughs, but your alert level will rise.
- Wanted Meter: The current alert level isn't visible by default, but doing things like killing robots, destroying infrastructure, or simply lingering on a level for too long will cause the alert level to rise, resulting in squads of increasingly-dangerous security robots being dispatched to hunt for you.
- Zerg Rush: The tactic of Swarmer bots. Individually, they are fragile and have weaker weapons than other security bots, but make up for this with speed and numbers.
