Cogmind is good. Hell, it's really good. It's got damn near the best UI of any roguelike ever made. There are six ways to do just about every action and any information you need is always a right click away, or a few keyboard commands if you're into that sort of thing. The lore is cryptic but fun and cool without being pretentious, and it informs every aspect of the game design. There's an in-universe justification for nearly every single mechanic in the game, nothing is gameified.
Plus, it plays very different from most roguelikes; you have an absurd amount of health, but the enemy has an absurd amount of robots, making it very difficult (but absolutely not impossible) for you to lose instantly in one enemy squad, but allows you to almost always have an escape option of just ditching parts to move fast and retreat. Hell, it's your only get out of jail card. There aren't any teleport potions in this robo-hell. All items are parts, and all parts constitute your build. This is balanced pretty tight: If you want to hack, if you want to fight, if you want to sneak, literally every single part you have must be built toward that purpose. You can't just splash on a couple hacking modules next to your accuracy up modules and expect to actually get anything.
That kinda loops into why I am voting it down. Fighting is utterly obnoxious but also absolutely mandatory (Yes, you damn leather pajama wearing stealth nerds, you MUST fight too. But the enemies that stalk out nerds like you can usually be dispatched without alerting a horde as none of the robots have ears.). Parts are your health, and the enemy's too. So you can spend six turns blasting shotguns into a robot at point blank before it finally dies because you never hit his core while he'll do the same and you'll rather wish he hit your core instead because now all your treads are blown off and you can't carry your guns. There is almost utterly zero reward for fighting apart from the satisfying gun sound effects. What there IS is immense cost because you will lose important, synergistic parts of your build every time as the damn mecha-freaks curve their bullets around your 3 armor plates to bullseye three of your flight modules in one salvo like they are glowing weak spots and you're a lame-a*s Star Fox boss... wait I guess they and you kinda are. It's not even that this is imbalanced, you swap parts so often that this isn't really a huge deal, but it is OBNOXIOUS to sit and watch every single fight break something important and cause you to have to stumble around raiding dozens of robot supply closets hoping you can find something that isn't garbage to replace it. Again, you cannot just grab whatever except to use it as an HP soak to plug a hole, if you have 7 combat parts, you need an 8th combat part period. A sneaking part or a gimmick utility part doesn't help, and you're completely at the mercy of what you can find while trying to hide between the next batch of insane murderbots trying to kill you, and no, the next 6 closets will have nothing but utter trash. Here's 30 heat guns and zero heat sinks if you are so mad the robots can't kill you, you want to just smoke yourself to humiliate them. There's a 4 square wide rapemech and a reinforcements spam calling asshole watching the next hallway, the ONLY hallway and guess what you haven't seen in the last 3 levels: A terrain scanner to help you desperately dig around that. (Eh just try it, the stairs are only, what, 20-30 squares that way? Surely there's a hallway... nope, just an instantly game-ending cave in when you decide to go all in.)
This is the point of the game, make no mistake. It is intended, and the game is balanced around it. I would not call it busted or broken or anything negative. You CAN master this and you CAN win against this and you CAN come up with plays and counterplays to school these servo-screwing freaks. If you think I'm crybaby loser and that all sounds like a blast, go hit the buy button. It absolutely is done well by any mechanical definition of the term! But I don't want to because the constant loss, constant scrambling, never actually knowing if I was supposed to check like six more pointless rooms 3 floors back to have what I need here or if I died from a dozen other mistakes because it takes so long going from being helpless to actually losing that I never end up actually having any fun midrun except for a few moments where I have a functioning synergistic build that does what it's supposed to do. The game may be good but it doesn't make me feel good. I'd almost rather go back to Nethack's idiotic 40 hour long instakill bullshit.
Addendum: I must add that the developer is utterly insane as on top of making one of the most unique and fully featured roguelikes of recent memory, he has created quite a few alternate game modes on top of that that completely change the gameplay while keeping the core game the same. There's an RPGlike mode that changes the mechanics so your parts don't take as much damage, but your core takes most of it, and fighting rewards you with XP and healing items. I appreciate the gesture and the sheer insanity and devotion it takes to make modes like this on top of your magnum opus, but in my experience this mode does nothing to address my issues with Cogmind and in fact exacerbates them in ways. Your parts don't get shot off, your actual health does. Remember when you blast the sniper in the face with dual shotguns six times and he shoots off your parts? Now he shoots off all your health instead. And it's just as unrewarding now because guess what neither he nor the 20 other robots you fight after him will drop: A SINGLE FUCKING HEALTH ITEM (Robots 21-25 will do a handy job of dropping you). The issues are all the same: combat is draining psychologically and unrewarding mechanically, only here the issues are exacerbated because now you can't recover by raiding supply closets you have to keep fighting to get more healing items which don't ever actually drop. Your choices are shredded and you are tied to an awful life or death gacha. Now, my experience with this mode is limited compared to my experience with the main game so it is doubly possible that I am just terrible, but I post this just to answer the question "What about RPG mode?" as it has been asked and offered many times before to people with issues like mine.)