Some games I played in 2025: Assault on Cobra Island
Looking up resources for G.I. Joe: Wrath of Cobra, I was curious what reception was like from G.I. Joe fans — lord knows beat-em-up fanatics were not thrilled with its offerings. While some were pleased with its fanservice, the consensus seemed to be that it wasn’t anywhere near the quality of standard as Turtles, and that it had no hope of winning over anyone who wasn’t already a fan of the franchise.
A pity! I don’t know how often it happens in this day and age, but I’m certain a number of franchises owe some of their popularity to a knockout video game tie-in, and part of me wants to see it more often. I’m hesitant to include Turok among those examples because motherfuckers are not reading the comics. I’ll change that one of these days, I swear.
More than one Steam review also made the comparison that this officially-licensed product simply wasn’t as good as Assault On Cobra Island, a fangame in the same vein made in the OpenBOR engine. Well, I guess I gotta investigate this too if I wanna be thorough!
OpenBOR, or Beats of Rage, is an engine used to create your own side-scrolling beat-em-up, similar to your MUGENs and what-have-you. I’ve known of it for decades, I think because of some light coverage on the olde Streets of Rage Online fansite? Back when folks really had to spelunk to find new entries in their favourite genre, but this is my first time getting hands-on with one of its creations.
Right off the bat, Assault on Cobra Island (or AOCI as it shall be summarised for brevity’s sake) is more immediately compelling because you can just shoot a bitch at any time. In addition to your standard punch, you can also use a special attack, spray machine gun fire forward, and huck a grenade, the three of which all drain from your stamina metre, which slowly refills automatically.
On top of that, there’s frequent interruptions from the standard walking and punching. There’s a number of shoot-em-up segments piloting a jet or submarine! Auto-scrolling skirmishes either on foot or on motorcycle! You hop into a big dumb tank at one point! There’s even quasi-2D platforming stages where you scale the outside of an enemy stronghold by way of moving platforms.
As someone’s introduction to OpenBOR, this is an ambitious little demonstration of what the engine is capable of! It might be made for brawling, but you can fiddle with the foundations just enough to create a similie of whatever else you might want to make, kind of like those poor souls making 2D platformers in RPG Maker. I gotta respect the chutzpah. Hats off for creativity. Hats firmly on for execution, though.
I’ve never touched MUGEN either, but I assume they have similar degrees of variables and properties to play with… and AOCI, for all its extraneous bells and whistles, feels a bit ‘default’ at times. Your movement speed is tremendously sluggish, making avoiding rockets and flamethrowers a bit of a pickle, and none of the vehicle stages are any faster either, which is bad news when you’re such a massive target.
If an enemy wants to shoot you until you die, or you’re caught between two dudes who’ve got punchin’ fury, you’ve no real recourse to stop them! There’s no invincibility frames (outside of a nebulously defined hop command), the enemies aren’t told to lay off and give you some space… Wrath of Cobra‘s solution to similar conundrums was to give you a block function. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but it was a solution…!
On the flip-side, you can just as easily steamroll enemies without them getting a word in. Running attacks and grenades are great for juggling, able to keep baddies in the air the entire length of the screen if you keep spamming them. Zippier foes like Cobra Commander are hard to land clean hits on, but when you do, you can whip out your machine gun and chew up their healthbar before they can recover. It’s by no means a balanced game, but that makes it all the more rewarding when you find ways to just mess up the competition.
It is amusing playing compare and contrast between fangame and product, and how sometimes they make the same failings. I beat AOCI in a little over an hour, but each level lasts a needless length of time, and while the genre-swerves are a pleasant surprise, they’re so basic and so stretched-out they also wear out their welcome pretty fast. Do I laud Wrath of Cobra for just sticking to its guns the whole time? Its levels also drag on and have far too many stopping points, but it doesn’t get my hopes up thinking this tank sequence will be fun and exhilarating.
AOCI‘s aesthetic is, uh, crunchy, shall we say. Music and sound clips ripped straight from the cartoon in deafening volume, and graphics from a whole variety of sources often rescaled in unflattering ways. Beats of Rage set a precedent by using assets from The King of Fighters for its players and enemies, so seeing edits and frankensteins of Capcom and SNK graphics shouldn’t come as a surprise, even if it feels like a charming flashback.
Street Fighter Alpha‘s Guile has been edited to make up three of the four player characters, with dodgy new hats and camo patterns to set them apart. It looks like Marvel vs. Capcom‘s Cyclops was modified to Snake Eyes, and a bevy of other familiar faces make up the other Joe and Cobra forces, including KOF‘s Heidern as Cobra Commander with a dashing dab attack.
Even if it was made in 2012 (src), it feels like a throwback to a time when cohesive art design was not high on the list of priorities for a fan project, but it’s a sign that the people who made it were passionate above all else, which I so love to see. It’s got so many ideas it wants to play with!
Seeing the various Joes rooting you on as you embark from the USS Flagg; all the vehicles you use or enemies you fight; the sheer variety of gimmicks, from the 2D platforming to the final level with its sub-chambers full of surprise boss fights. I didn’t even get to play four of the post-game bonus missions because I accidentally restarted the campaign and had no way of getting back to the level select. It plays dodgy, it looks wonky, everything goes on far too long, and you could safely describe a good chunk of its challenges as obnoxious.
But I respect it! It’s oozing with that ambitious fangame charm, wanting to pack as much content and cram as many of its ideas in as possible, feasibility be damned. The tank is not a power fantasy, but an exercise in awkwardly strafing incoming attacks while fighting walls for half time the time. The jeep fills the entire bloody screen and ‘attacks’ by ramming forwards and backwards in a jittery motion. The final level and sole post-game stage I played (Storm Shadow’s lair) ask the question, “what’s stopping me from filling every screen with the most obnoxious enemies the game has to offer?” and doesn’t bother waiting for an answer.
An impression I get from some fangames is while I may not have gleaned much pleasure from it, I bet the developer had a ton of fun putting it all together. Figuring out the capabilities of this engine to do more than just belt-scrolling; thinking up setpieces to fight big names in the Cobra army; even finding graphics that are fit for various purposes, be it locations or props or who’s a close enough fit for these specific characters. It scratches that “toybox” itch I associate with the series; our breadth of imagination has no boundaries, but all I have is what’s available to me, so I have to make every piece count in making it into what I want it to be.
And with no expectations beyond putting together something in your free time, there’s more room to be pleasantly surprised. I have not looked into its development, but I get the impression Snake Eyes was the sole focus at the start, before the other three characters and bonus missions were added in future updates. Clutch seems an odd inclusion among these big names, a character who means nothing to a casual observer of the franchise, but I can only speculate his toy was a childhood favourite of the developer, making it all the more charming.
It’s messy and uneven, but I imagine it exemplifies Joe fans wanted to see in a video game tie-in. It’s got guns, it’s got vehicles, it’s got setpieces, it’s got all your favourite characters, either as a static background sprite or otherwise! To see someone bring those ideas to life through amassing whatever resources were at their disposal is the kind of crap I love to see in fangames and indie projects. Mechanically, it might not light the world on fire, but all the ideas are there, enough to tickle the brain in its fanservice receptors.
Which is why Wrath of Cobra has such a different hill to climb. Yes, it’s got official backing from Hasbro, and the budget for all-original coding and assets, and even animated cutscenes that try to harken the feel of the original 1980s cartoon… but it’s also subject to deadlines, to hitting development milestones, to budgets and crunch and all that grown-up crap. I am not privy to the behind-the-scenes on the game, and respect what they were able to accomplish, but working under those conditions means it has to lock in far sooner, compared to somebody’s freeware project that’s beholden to nothing but spare time and idle whims.
They’re alike and dissimilar, unique takes on the same basic ideas, and subject to different expectations. I had fun with both, even if both experiences were rife with exasperation: why make it like this? AOCI is easier to recommend on account of its sheer flight-of-fancy and the fact it costs you nothing, but my heart still yearns for the janky nonsense that was my time with Wrath of Cobra. Even though there’s more content in AOCI I’ve yet to play, I’m in less of a hurry because it just becomes akin to running yourself through a meat grinder past a certain point.
Again, I’m no Joe-head, but I’d still like to see the series find some success in video games, and the past two decades of military gumbo feels like there should be room for something sillier and more toyetic among them.
A good 3D entry would need to handle a wide variety of skills: your variety of big dumb artillery, your melee attacks and kung-fu grip, running the gamut of vehicles and aircraft, covering land, sea and air, plus the sheer number of dudes on both sides… it’s asking a lot! Operation Blackout on modern consoles looks pleasantly fluffy, but I don’t hear outstanding things about it either.
Unfortunately, I think Fortnite kind of invented that ball then took it home with them. It really is Toy Box: The Video Game! Between its plethora of guns, weapons, vehicles, literal superpowers, the ridiculous grab-bag of characters (Snake Eyes is even in the roster already!)… most games would kill to have that amount of assets, and the polish to make it all work.
It’s got such a surplus of mechanics that I imagine you could assemble a kickass single-player campaign out of it — imagine the setpieces you could build, a Cobra lair spanning the breadth of your average battle royale map, manning S.H.A.R.C.s and jetpacks and all sorts!
… but I can’t imagine Epic are in the business of letting other people play with an entire game they’ve built; engines yes, remixes no. Which, like, I get it. It’s only the biggest freakin’ money-maker gaming has seen in the past decade. They’ve effectively assimilated whatever audience or market there might be for similar experiences, making it an uphill battle to compete. And if you want in, you become a player skin. What makes you so special that you want an entire game to yourself? We’re not a charity.
But also, game development costs, man. Let me play with my toys the way I want. I understand playing against fellow humans presents a level of challenge and adaptability that your average shooter game’s enemy AI could not match parity with, but I just prefer single-player games. And I want my guns and jetpacks given to me as standard military issue, not by raiding random houses!
It’s strange having no direct attachment to G.I. Joe, but wanting its tie-in media to fare well, whereas I am and remain a Transformers nutcase, but just have little to no interest in anything it’s put out in the past decade. I think when I become so obsessed over a series, nothing it produces can ever quite live up to my own expectations or imagination; it might lend interesting new ideas or visuals, but all it’s about what I want to see. One can dream!
