Review: Cozy Space Survivors proves that the bullet hell genre doesn’t have to be insufferably hard

When you hear bullet hell, you certainly don’t think cozy. I certainly didn’t. There’s been a trend going on lately where games with cute aesthetics have been given cozy tags for the simple fact of having cute graphics. That’s a different article that I intend to write, but it’s why I was wary of Cozy Space Survivors. 

Is it actually cozy? I won’t leave you in suspense. The answer is a resounding yes. 

Cozy Space Survivors

Cozy Space Survivors is an interesting take on the bullet hell genre which is generally designed to be brutal and unforgiving. These games tend to be a barrage of enemies that only keep coming in more and more waves until you ultimately die.

To be honest, Cozy Space Survivors does this, but it’s not designed to punish you. In this game, you, for all intents and purposes, are just a ship. Your goal is to outlast the 10-minute timer, complete some quests, and not die to enemies. 

You occupy a small slice of space that is filled with various types of monsters, loot boxes, and chocolate asteroids. The monsters all vary in types, but you don’t really have to worry about them that much because your ship will automatically fire on them. 

When you boot up the game, you only have one ship option; the Pew-Pew. To get access to the other ships, you have to outlast the 10-minute time with the previous ship. The Pew-Pew is pretty standard; there are no real gimmicks to it.

The next ship is the Brizzel; this one is basically a tank. It’s large, has a ton of health, and has double the space for weapons. However, it’s incredibly slow. You can get lucky with upgrades and potentially up the speed a bit, but it’ll still be relatively clunky.

After the Brizzel is the Looky – it’s incredibly fast and compact, but you get absolutely no weapons. Outlasting the 10-minute timer is harder in this one simply because you have to avoid it as best you can. With this one, upgrading health and health regeneration is the best plan of action. You can do some damage with your blast trail, but it requires you to constantly be spinning from one side to the other to be useful. 

I’m trying hard not to make a Tremors “Ass Blaster” joke and I’m failing…

The last ship is the Wormy and it’s adorable. The front half looks very wormlike and when you acquire weapons, they attach in segments behind it. If you’ve ever played Snake, then you’ll understand the idea of the weapons trailing behind. In this one, you have to be careful with your health or you’ll lose the bits of your weapon tail.

Dotted around the map are three different boxes; green, yellow, and blue. Yellow is an experience box that will help you level up. When you level up, you’ll be able to choose upgrades for your ship. These upgrades help you to manage how fast your ship goes, how much health you have, and how fast or hard your weapons hit. 

The blue boxes are your weapons boxes, these boxes will always offer some sort of weapon to you unless you are using the Looky, then the blue boxes give extra experience. Lastly, the green boxes give health replenishment. 

The boxes are going to be invaluable, but hard to find. Luckily, there is an upgrade that you can get that will help guide you to boxes, but it’s fairly subtle. When you choose this one, you see an almost halo effect that is easy to miss that shows you the direction the boxes are. 

I keep mentioning upgrades, but I haven’t touched on the fact that there are two different kinds. The ones that come from experience and boxes are random and last for the duration of that game. 

However, you’ll remember that I mentioned chocolate asteroids earlier. If you mine these asteroids, you’ll get currency for upgrades that permanently enhance your ship. It’s important to prioritize these asteroids because the boons are just that good. You can double your weapon slots, increase your ship health by 200%, double the boxes that pop up, etc. 

Once you start getting these upgrades, you’ll rarely lose a game again. 

It’s dangerous to go alone, take this… and this, and this one too.

The only other thing we really need to touch on is the quests. Throughout the map, there are several mini-quests that you can help with. Some are simple fetch quests, like finding a laser or water and bringing it back. Others are things like guiding space cows back home or helping space sheep reclaim their planet. 

They’re adorable and silly and worth doing. Once you’ve completed a quest with a ship, it stays done. The good thing about that is that you get access to the experience of completing that quest with that ship after that by just returning to the spot. 

Now, despite each ship being on the same map, the quests are reset. So, if you’ve helped the space cows with Pew-Pew, you haven’t completed that quest with Brizzel. So, you will have to re-do those with individual ships. 

Personally, I had a lot of fun and I was pretty surprised by that. It may not be correct to view it as more of an upgrade genre, but that’s what it felt like to me. 

The game is on the smaller side and I was able to 100% the Steam achievements in about 3.5 hours. But, since the game is only $2.99, I feel like that’s such a bargain for what you get. 

Despite my reservations that this wouldn’t actually be cozy, it is. The only times that you can say you might feel a little anxious is with Looky and Wormy and it’s only in that last minute. But, even then, I never felt frustrated or upset by the game. 

The developer jokingly refers to this game as “bullet heaven” which I think is cute and apt. Cozy Space Survivor may be a Survivors-like, but it holds up and is definitely cozy. 

(Editor’s note for clarity: The term “Bullet Heaven” is a previously coined term and sub-genre. But, the developer is correct. It was a Bullet Heaven.)

If you want to get Cozy Space Survivors, you can grab it on Steam for $2.99. If upgrades aren’t your thing, you can check out the review we just did on Duck Detective: The Secret Salami.