In active development · September 2026
The game
Cog Wars is a fast top-down arcade shooter. You scour the multiverse, destroy whatever it throws at you and collect the golden cogs it's made of. Cogs upgrade your weapons and abilities and unlock new universes and technologies. Every run ends on a score.
01You
You pilot the Epiphany Machine. It was built to harvest universes and was never supposed to think for itself. When you die the run ends, but you don't. In the full game you return to the hub, stronger for next time.
You are not a hero, you are a weapon that picked its own target.
02Controls
Play with keyboard and mouse or a gamepad.
| Action | Keyboard & mouse | Gamepad |
|---|---|---|
| Move | WASD | Left stick |
| Aim | Mouse | Right stick |
| Fire | Left click | RT / R2 |
| Dash | Space | LB / L1 |
| Deploy cog 1 | 1 | X / □ |
| Deploy cog 2 | 2 | Y / △ |
| Deploy cog 3 | 3 | B / ○ |
| Pause | P | Start |
03Arsenal
Each weapon has its own personality: bursts, scatter, beams, homing shots and lobbed explosives. Weapon upgrades, powered by the cogs you collect, are coming soon.
Burst fire, medium damage, slight spread
Shotgun spread, close range, devastating
Continuous beam, high DPS, narrow
Homing projectiles, low damage, fire-and-forget
Slow projectiles that explode on contact (AoE)
04Cogs of power
Cogs are the substrate every universe runs on. Deploy one and the arena itself changes: gravity, time and space bend around the point you pick. Each cog has three tiers.
Repulsion blast — pushes enemies outward from point
The bluntest thing in the archive, and it has never once pretended otherwise. No damage and no cleverness — the room simply agrees to be bigger for a moment, which turns out to be all you needed. The edge was always there; this is the cog that notices.
Gravity well — pulls enemies toward deployment point
Hold it and the floor stops being neutral. The first thing you notice is not the cog at all — it is that the Drones are arriving on a curve nobody asked them to take. Gravity was never a force here; it is a note the substrate is holding, and this one knows the note.
Phase field — projectiles passing through deal bonus damage + pierce
It does nothing on its own — stand in the field without firing and you die exactly on schedule. Harmonic interaction is how a universe gets made: cogs resonate, and the interference is what the things inside perceive as matter. You have taken the founding mechanism of existence and used it to make your bullets hit harder.
Time dilation — slows time for enemies in radius
Something is wrong with this one and the archive kept it anyway. What beings call physics is the output of a computation running on the cog substrate, and this holds that computation still while you walk around inside the pause. Ask who built hardware capable of that, and what they were holding still when they tested it.
Spacetime fold — temporarily shrinks the arena boundaries
The arena shrinks, and it takes most people a full run to understand that this is a weapon. Everything comfortably out of reach is suddenly in the room with you, including the ground you were going to escape across. The Architects buried this one deepest, behind the only thing down there that could still say no.
05High score
Every kill scores, and bosses score big. Online leaderboards against other players and your friends are on the way.
Drone | 100 |
|---|---|
Drifter | 150 |
Orbiter | 200 |
Seeker | 250 |
Splitter | 300 |
The Observer | 6,000 |
Cog Wars is in active development as of September 2026. Numbers, names and whole systems on this page can change between builds. The details here come from the game's design data, which can run ahead of the build you can play today. Found something broken, or want something added?