Cortex Command

Simple instructions

Mine precious gold from the deformable pixel terrain in order to buy more and better ships, soldiers, weapons, digging tools, and deployable defenses. Use these assets to defend your disembodied brain and bankrupt your opponent! Old-school 2D sidescroller pixel graphics coupled with an extremely detailed physics simulation makes for a mix of nostalgia and surprising gameplay.

—Product description

So in the future, you're a Brain In a Jar, on a Worms-like 2D battlefield controlling Mooks. You're competing with other factions on a new, Earth-like planet to find resources and ship them back to civilization, or at least whatever you have left, since you spend pretty much all your money on weaponry. Notable for having an impressively advanced physics and destruction engine, which can allow for a variety of emergent gameplay.

The game isn't actually finished yet. Created by Data Realms, the Retraux game currently is a demo with several test levels, some of which have a six minute time limit, making it in essence a sophisticated toy. Regardless, Data Realm is encouraging players to buy the game now, for $18 instead of the $38 they're planning to charge when the game is complete, a model also used successfully by Mount & Blade and (On a cheaper scale) Minecraft.

The game features a slowly growing single player campaign with five scenarios currently available. There are several levels available for skirmish mode, and the game features splitscreen multiplayer but no online element. The creator is currently focusing on expanding the campaigns and code for the game while having additional staff work on content as the code rolls out. The game also has a very active modding community and a wide variety of mods that add or change many features in the game as well as adding campaign missions and skirmish areas.

Cortex Command Main Site Link

The link for the fan forums which also houses the mod community Forums & Mod Community

Tropes used in Cortex Command include:

• Artificial Stupidity: The A.I. of the game will continue to drop it's mooks into your kill zones, crash drop ships, and have multiple friendly fire accidents.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: pretty much every single sprite in the game.
• BFG: Several in the core game, including the aptly named Uber Cannon.
• Bifurcated Weapon: Cluster mine bomb and cluster grenade.
• Big Bad: The currently fluff-only Remnants of Mu-ilaak.
• Brain In a Jar: What you and your opponents are.
• Brain Uploading^[context?]
• Bullethole Door: A possible tactic for entering enemy forts.
  • Often difficult to pull off, though, as very few tools can penetrate the steel-reinforced concrete of the bunkers.
• Chainsaw Good: Rocket Propelled Chain Saws.
• Critical Existence Failure: You can end up bleeding and legless but assuming you still have arms, work perfectly fine in combat until the fatal shot. Heck, even totally limbless people can still "help" by flying around and bashing people with their jetpacks...
• Colony Drop: The delivery vehicles that your stuff comes in make remarkably good disposable weapons. It's possible to simply order an empty dropship or rocket and smash it into the enemy.
  • Or better, order one full of crab bodies and bombs. Then drop it on the enemy base.
• Death From Above: The above mentioned crates make a very cheap delivery system for high explosive ordnance, and with the self destruct option can be easily detonated above groups to rain shrapnel on their heads.
  • Also, dropships can be used to drop bombs on your enemies, which come in Standard (frag) and Napalm variants. For a cheaper option, you can also load them up with stick grenades, since they have an impact fuse.
• Disability Superpower: A character's jetpack flight time is directly correlated with how much it weighs. Losing both legs can actually improve your mobility.
• Dronejam: The 2Dness of the game even extends to the point of making your own units solid to each other, meaning that it's impossible for them to get by or shoot past each other in tight spaces. Units can crouch and go prone to make room, but spraying allies with your jetpack or stepping on them can do a lot of damage.
• Drop Ship: In the game, two are available, and they are fairly important in terms of gameplay. Crates are cheap but total-loss delivery vehicles, and rockets are so very hard to fly that they might as well qualify as total-loss too (as the AI so efficiently demonstrates). The dropships are the only delivery vehicles that can be reasonably expected to make it back to orbit and give the player their purchase price back. They're also easier to use as disposable impact weapons than rockets.
• Epic Fail: Dropship accidents and explosives backfiring can make your failure so spectacular it becomes hilarious.
• Everything Breaks: As a matter of fact, this is the only way to dig up more resources.
• Game Mods: One of the main selling points is the game's mod community, which has produced many different armies (including the SPESS MEHREENS). Mods can cause Loads and Loads of Loading and, if poorly coded, error messages.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: The Laser Rifle.
• Gatling Good: The Coalition faction seems to like them--they have sentry gun and drone varieties, as well as a handheld version.
  • The Ronin used to have the YAK 700, which has since been removed.
• Giant Enemy Crab: You'll fight one of these as your first boss.
• Global Currency: Oz, a notation for ounces often used to measure an amount of gold.
• Goomba Stomp: Entirely possible, often accidentally. It's not uncommon for one or two of your troops to accidentally stomp each other into oblivion as they hop out of a dropship.
• Gorn: You can blow off arms, legs, heads, or splatter entire characters into a spray of blood and gibs.
• Guns Akimbo: Several Game Mods.
• Improvised Weapon: Almost anything. Shovels, digging tools, Dropships, Automatic Doors (Which you can time to crush enemies, though it requires some skill), Jetpacks.
• Implacable Man: Dreadnoughts or certain heavy units can take serious damage and will continue to try and kill you character even if it is by just stepping on them.
  • However like all units, they will quickly die when being shot with any diggers.
• Infinite Supplies: Your troops have to reload, but they always have more magazines.
  • Averted for throwable items.
• Instant Death Radius: If you find yourself a foot or so away from a drone you are screwed.
• Instrumental Theme Tune^[context?]
• Jet Pack: Most characters have one, and they're both a.) vital for getting around and b.) comically difficult to steer.
• Kill It with Fire: Molotov Cocktails, incendiary bombs from drop ships, incendiary grenades, flame throwers.
• Lethal Joke Item: The crab body is tiny, defenseless, and can't do anything but crawl around. However, they're also free--if you pack several dozen of them into a single rocket or crate, you have yourself a very cheap Big Bulky Bomb that will kill everything on the map in a holocaust of flying crabmeat.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: Three playable factions plus two additional ones in game give it a well rounded cast.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: There are few shields of one variety or another for the factions.
• Ludicrous Gibs: This is not a game for the squeamish.
• Mind Control Device: You
• More Dakka: Plenty of automatic weapons with high rates of fire.
  • Suitably, there's also an Ork mod that adds in a number of ridiculously powerful automatic weapons.
• Names to Run Away From Really Fast: The "Avenger" Shotgun.
  • The Mauler shotgun as well, sadly both since been Dummied Out.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Fanmade content includes RoboLichLer, aka Cyber-Lich Hitler.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Even if all but one of their limbs have been blown off and they're slowly bleeding to death, if a clone still has a gun in his hand, he'll keep on fighting as best he can. And when even that has been torn off, they can always be flown at high speed across the map until a dropship flies low enough and gets an engine shredded by the mad flying clone torso.
• Retraux^[context?]
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: A few Game Mods contain them.
• Sentry Gun: Comes in armored dummy variety and Gatling Coalition variety.
• Shareware: The free version has a 6 minute cutoff per session.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Mostly averted, played straight by the Blunderbuss.
• Shout-Out: Spathi^[context?]
  • in addition, there are many easter eggs hidden on the maps, such as metroids in zombie cave, and the Pac-Man shaped rock in one of the background images, amoung many other things.
• Space Station: The TradeStar^[context?]
• Spider Tank: The dummy Dreadnought.^[context?]
• 2-D Space: The entire game is 2D, space as well, evidenced by the TradeStar that orbits the planet exactly perpendicular to your eye.
• Weaponized Exhaust: the dropships are unarmed, but can be used to quite deadly effect by flying them on top of enemy units and hitting the throttle. The rockets, on the other hand, must be used with extreme care, because their exhaust has the tendency to kill the units they just delivered.
• We Cannot Go on Without You/Decapitated Army: If your brain is destroyed, you will automatically lose. Justified, as the units that you order are literally brainless and have to be controlled by you.