Cockhead is a 2D Run & Gun parodying the ever-popular game called Cuphead. It has us playing as a giant anthropomorphic penis as he goes to meet his equally girthy wife. As tends to happen from time to time, a giant flying vagina descends from the sky to murder you with a pitchfork as your wife is kidnapped by the Klu Klux Klan. This sees god himself also descend from the sky with his divine sack hovering over our corpse, leading to us being resurrected. Caught all that? Yeah, what a way to open a game, and it only gets more charmingly insane from then on.
From that pic, you can immediately see one of Cockhead’s greatest strengths. Its visual style is a real treat for the eyes with that old cartoon look and cheeky animations. After that wild intro, I immediately started grinning again as I moved our character, then saw the little plumes of dust kicking off the floor. Everything is heavily stylized and frankly adorable, for as strange as it is to say that about a walking schlong that makes cute little slapping noises with its “feet”. It is not in any way sexual in nature really, aside from the characters happening to be anthropomorphic genitals. This title isn’t even Adult rated on Steam, which I feel it probably should be, and as such marked it as R18+ in this review.
Unfortunately, I decided to start off with its best aspect first since I have very little else to praise this title for. For as much work clearly went into its art, the game itself plays like a poorly made cheap asset flip. This is not due to a lack of ideas or features, but the flat-out incomplete state of this title. It won’t be long before you encounter your first impassable level. That happens in stage four, in a scene that has you rapidly trying to hop onto higher grounds as rising waters threaten to drown you. This all sounds well and good, save for the fact most of the environments will never load in, including the necessary platforms. It is impossible to progress naturally at this point. You’ll need to head back into the main menu and access the level selection screen to skip past it. The level selection doesn’t let you go to any level you haven’t played, just the one after your current one, making me believe this was a known issue and a band-aid solution.
Not long after that game-stopping glitch, there is yet another impassable stage soon after. It involves you skating away from a police Humvee after having given marijuana to some stoner dicks blocking your path. To defeat this boss, you need to repeatedly shoot at it. The problem here being that your weapons were taken away and are now left with your starter pistol. After wearing out both my keyboard and fingers mashing the attack button trying to take it down, I thought to myself maybe it was trying to get me to use the never mentioned weapon shop you can access while pausing. So I bought a new weapon and some ammo for the sub-machine guns you had in the earlier levels that was inexplicably taken away. It did absolute jack. You are still stuck with that basic pistol and just wasted your coins. Thankfully, this was the last impassable level, for what little consolation that is.
Having skipped that level, I became curious as to if the weapon shop even actually worked. The problem now was I had no coins as I blew it all trying to get through the last impossible stage. You do not get coins from defeating enemies or anything of the sort. They are found in the first-aid boxes that you’d assume are there to heal your health when broken, though nope, their use is as bouncing platforms for greater height while jumping. It is kind of interesting that your bounce platforms can be broken and tempt you to cut it as close as possible by damaging it for coins, in all fairness. I went through the first two levels again and backed out to the stage selector after. As it turns out, all the levels I have previously completed were reset when I chose to start at an earlier one, and had to make my way from stage two again.
So did the weapon shop work at least? Nope, it still does absolutely nothing, whatever the level you are on may be. Stage three has you facing off against the first boss of the game. One of the first things you’ll notice is that there is no indication if you are even doing damage, leaving you clueless if you are doing things correctly. It also has you trying to ignore that weird graphical glitch in the middle of the screen. This is the most polished boss fight of the game, as sad as that sounds.
I can complain about each individual level and point out all of its flaws, but it all comes down to it being flat-out incomplete and in severe need of polish at the end of the day. This is not an Early Access title. It is being sold as a completed game. The puzzling thing is that the framework is all there for a decent experience, and it actually does have a good amount of content. From beginning till end, Cockhead is full of charm and things to see, but it is just barely functional gameplay-wise. It was as if the developer got tired of working on it and pushed it out during its alpha state, considering that very few of its features work. Like why in the world does pausing the game and looking up the key-bindings restart the level? Going into the none functioning weapon shop doesn’t.
Speaking of controls, it is stated as having partial gamepad support. I suppose this is true, in a sense. Plug in your Xbox controller and you can indeed move around. You can’t shoot, jump, or anything else however. That won’t get you very far. It is keyboard or nothing if you plan on playing this title, but just remember, don’t look up the key-bindings mid-level or it restarts the entire thing. I didn’t have much of an issue with the controls. They work fine. You have your usual ‘WASD’ to move, E&Q to switch weapons, Spacebar to jump, ‘J’ to air dash, and finally ‘I’ to shoot. It may sound a bit complex for those not used to controlling a game solely with their keyboard, but it works well. Both of your hands will be centered in sensible positions, making it one of the few things I don’t have a qualm with in this title.
At first, I assumed the starting zone was a jab at the infamous video where a journalist couldn’t get out of the tutorial level of Cuphead. If you are not aware that there is an air dash, there is no way you’ll be making it over the second gap. After playing it, I’m not entirely sure that was intentional. Cockhead is overly obtuse. In multiple points, it had me wondering if the game simply became impassible again or if I was missing something. One stage sees you have a small stint in a jail cell with no guns or way to escape. What you do have if you explore your cell will be a human bone and a hacksaw. I’ll just spoil the solution. You need to throw your bone out the window, go to get another, and chuck that one too. This allows you to use the hacksaw to cut one bar that you could clearly fit through now, but nope. Do that whole slow process four more times. Also, don’t press E or your character decides to spin mid-air and shoot himself into the stratosphere, never to return.
That is thankfully the only Sierra-like adventure section in Cockhead. The other form of gameplay that breaks up the usual Run & Gun will be a few shmup levels. I found them to be the most consistently playable areas of the game. Not good, mind you. They just don’t have the usual game-stopping jank the rest of it has. What it does have is that towards the end, the visuals get really confusing. You will not know what is simple background scenery and what objects will damage you if you fly into them. It still suffers from one being unable to tell if we are doing any damage to a boss, yet considering we can’t do anything other than move and shoot, it is more evident. They just take a darn long time to go down and do not have differing sprite stages to show they are wounded. At the very least, they could have made them slightly flash whenever you got a hit in to know you are actually doing damage.
I was nearly considering not doing this review since I don’t enjoy bashing a game, more so when it clearly had some effort put into it. This just should have been released as an Early Access title, or at the very least had somewhere stating it is incomplete. Judging from the date of the last update and that they moved onto another title already, one can only assume Cockhead will remain this way. I’d advise the reader to also take the Mostly Positive rating on Steam with a huge grain of salt. All of the positive reviews are people just memeing. It is not indicative of the quality of this game. This has the potential to be a fun forty-minute adventure through a very creative and beautifully drawn world, but in its current state, I question if it should even be sold at all.
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