What Cortex Command is
Cortex Command is a 2D pixel-art game built around a detailed physics engine, so fights come out differently every time and the terrain remembers what happened. You pick a faction, each with its own expendable soldier bodies, mechas, weapons, tools, and landing craft, and your job is to protect your own brain while digging through the terrain for gold and destroying the enemy cortex hidden in a bunker complex. Environments are fully destructible: gold is scattered through the dirt, and digging tools let you blast tunnels straight through it. Bodies, ship parts, and debris fall to the ground and stay there, so the battlefield keeps filling up with the wreckage of your fights.
Playing it with a group
Cortex Command supports up to four players in cooperative or versus play, running skirmish or campaign missions with or against each other. You can set it up as 2 vs 2, 1 vs 3, or all four against the CPU. Controls are flexible: keyboard, keyboard plus mouse, or any generic game controller you plug in. Remote Play Together is available if you want to bring friends in from Discord. Split screen and local co-op are supported, so a group sitting around with controllers can jump straight into a match.
Campaign and bunker building
The turn-based strategic campaign wraps the real-time tactical fights into a larger context, giving each battle consequences. Terrains are persistent across a campaign: gold-rich ground and the bunkers you build carry over from fight to fight, accumulating layers of debris, tunnels, ruins, and corpses that record the history of each place. At the start of most missions you build your command bunker from scratch, designing tunnels and placing doors, traps, and turrets, then pre-deploying bodies around the installation. Spending too much up front leaves you short of funds once the mission begins.
Buying, delivery, and modding
An in-game buying menu works at any point, ordering new bodies and equipment delivered by the transport ship you choose. Rockets are cheap but unreliable and hard to land; drop ships cost far more but can deploy a whole group onto difficult terrain quickly. Anything you send back to the TradeStar is refunded. Several built-in editors let you design your own missions, guys, ships, weapons, tools, bombs, and shields, and the engine is built so mods are simple to make and share with friends.