I’ve been following the development of Cookie Cutter for a long time now. The game’s stunning artwork and animations really piqued my curiosity and the promise of intricate combat was enough to sell me on the title. The dust has settled and I can absolutely see what the development team was going for with its large, colourful world and varied roster of enemies. The game is indeed good, but I feel it could easily be considerably better for many reasons, some of which will get worked out as it receives patches. The game might be a bit too undercooked, but it’s still got plenty of fun to offer, doubly so if you wait for patches.
Cookie Cutter has solid aspects to its premise. Androids called Denzels are made using the souls of the dead. Cherry is a Denzel made by a scientist named Shinji who is kidnapped by the game’s villain. A damsel-rescuing mission in this day-and-age? Eh. The story isn’t actually at all in the forefront for most of the game, regardless, as there’s very little plot movement for most of the runtime. Cherry’s character design is clearly meant to buck beauty standards, but animations are accompanied by near-constant shots of her underwear, which greatly diminishes whatever the devs were going for.
All of the game’s animations are of remarkably high quality as far as fidelity goes, though, from Cherry herself to the game’s bestiary and bosses. The animation is likely the strongest thing on display here. The entirety of the art direction mostly feels inspired, with terrific use of colour that helps to distinguish the game’s many biomes. The level design doesn’t quite grant the proceedings a sense of place, but it does a more than serviceable job, save for the over-reliance on points of no return that require you to go out of your way to grab something you may have missed.
Tiger uppercut!
As a Metroid-like, Cookie Cutter is highly focused on obtaining new abilities that let you reach new areas. The game tends to tell you where you need to go with a big exclamation point, so the proceedings are fairly linear, but there’s a solid amount of exploration and the map mostly makes it easy to know where you can go to reach an unvisited area. All NPCs are also helpfully marked on the map, which I massively appreciated. The game has a fairly compelling world that I mostly enjoyed exploring, which is impressive given that it’s a decent size.
Cherry has a default attack string that doesn’t do much damage, as well as five other weapons that you’ll discover while playing. Landing hits with basic attacks grants Void, which is used to power these other weapons, special abilities, and Cherry’s healing capabilities. This leads to a good balance between landing hits and doling out lots of punishment. The combat itself mostly feels good, as enemies get smacked around and launched in the air. It’s fast and flashy in a way that reminds me of God of War.
The aforementioned five weapons can be upgraded with currency and enemy drops, but I mostly just stuck with the fist weapon that you get early on, as I’d been upgrading it throughout the game and switching to another weapon can prove prohibitively expensive. These other weapons include a chainsaw-esque one, a guitar, and a blaster. Granted, the game’s combat doesn’t change all that much over the course of the adventure, but it’s better than what is often on display in these sorts of games.
Pull your punches
Some cracks start to show in terms of the enemies, though. You’ll find ranged foes peppered throughout and they can often shoot through objects, meaning you can get hit from off-screen attacks that have an annoying amount of knock-back with a longer-than-necessary bit of downtime before a wake-up animation. Cherry has a dodge with a huge amount of invincibility frames that can be used to safely avoid most enemy attacks, but she also has a parry that can be used to dispatch enemies instantly. When enemy health is low enough, you can use a finisher that returns some health and void.
Cookie Cutter isn’t a difficult game, but the usefulness of the parry caused the devs to give it an extremely tight window, which feels like a kneejerk to me. Not only is this window teeny-tiny, but the timing is less clear than it should be. It just doesn’t feel all that great. The game is also fond of throwing a ton of enemies at you at once, making it borderline impossible to see what’s going on at times, even more so when the camera pulls back. Things just feel kind of messy and poorly considered, especially in conjunction with how obnoxious the ranged enemies can be. Plus, there’s a pointless flash that obscures the game’s finisher animations which is a real shame.
Early on, bosses got on my nerves due to how much damage they do, but their movesets are simple, so it doesn’t take much practice to beat them despite this. But the boss and enemy issues are nothing compared to Cookie Cutter‘s undeniable lack of polish in many regards. I don’t think I’ve seen a game like this release with so many issues. Old story-based dialogue triggers reoccur upon re-entering an area. Chests respawn, including some quest items. The exclamation points can also reset, but there can only be one at a time, so re-triggering old quest lines can erase the indication of where you’re actually supposed to go. An NPC who runs a shop fails to move to the home base due to a bug as well. Adequate QA was simply not done here. I’ve also crashed a few times.
Despite those issues, though, I do enjoy Cookie Cutter. I think patches will even things out, but it’s disappointing to see so many obvious glaring issues go unnoticed by the dev team. I also felt that the density of major findable upgrades is uneven, as I found lots during the early game, but these slowed to a trickle after a while. This is still a good Metroid-like, but I recommend waiting a few weeks for patches or, at the very least, going in with the understanding that the game has some issues that need to be fixed.
Cookie Cutter: Large, decently varied, and full of nooks and crannies to explore, Cookie Cutter ticks most of the Metroid-like boxes. It has some design issues and plenty of bugs, though, which drag the experience below where a more practiced hand would have left it. – Andrew Farrell
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