There are things I want to really like about ReCore. The movement and traversal mechanics can feel really good, there are interesting and unique elements to the combat, and there's a great deal of charm emanating from each robot frame that you'll take along with you on your journey. There's just so much fighting you along the way that it will eventually beat you into submission. The game is riddled with baffling design decisions, bugs and monotony. Being that ReCore was head up by Armature, a company made up of numerous ex Retro employees, - the developers behind the outstanding Metroid Prime Series - and Kenji Inafune's - the creator of Mega Man - new studio, Comcemt, I was hopeful for what to expect from ReCore. Unfortunately the positive elements are far outweighed by the negative, and the game becomes something of a joyless slog after the first three hours or so.
In ReCore you’ll take control of Joule a girl who’s been sent to the distant planet of Far Eden ahead of the other colonists in order to prepare for their arrival. After realizing that the other ships are falling dangerously behind schedule, Joule and her corebot dog, Mack, take to the sands of Far Eden to find that it is inhabited by hostile, corrupted corebots. In order to find out exactly what's gone wrong Joule and Mack set out to comb through Far Eden, destroying the corrupted corebots, exploring dungeons, and collecting strange power sources known as 'prismatic cores’ along the way. The story is totally serviceable, but by no means outstanding. So many of the cutscenes feel so rushed that it's really hard to gain any sort of meaningful connection to the characters. The game does do a lot to add personality to the robots, however, through colourful animations making them take on the mannerisms of the earthly animals they’re emulating. The game presents its narrative in some inspired ways too, as Joule's dad narrates much of the game through recorded logs detailing plans for inhabiting Far Eden. Still, nearing the end of the game, I simply didn't care about the wrap up. This might be a good time to mention that I haven't completed ReCore, and don't intend to.
I know that it's something of a taboo to review a game without completing it, but the end of the game is so obviously padded out with tedium that I just couldn't bring myself to the finish line. Great jobReCore, you did it. You beat me. I'll explain. Throughout the game you're collecting these little glowing balls called 'prismatic cores.' These cores are some source of energy that Joule is unfamiliar with and something that the game's antagonist, Victor, wants very badly. In the early goings of the game, you're casually collecting these cores here and there and using them to open doors. Exactly one time I encountered a door that informed me I needed three more prismatic cores to enter. "Well," I thought, "that's no problem, for the game has marked three locations on my map where I might find a prismatic core. This'll be a cinch." And it was. Collecting those cores for that specific mission was, indeed, no chore at all. The game had failed to mention to me, however, that this was something I would need to continue to do - with no added objective indicator - in order to complete the game. See, the last bit of the game has you climbing a tower that has five floors. At the end of each floor there's a door that requires prismatic cores, and the required number increases by five each time. If you're like me, by the time you've reached this portion of the game - which comes alarmingly quick - you have nowhere near the amount of cores you need, so back to the over-world to scour the sands for more cores for you. I got to the third floor of the tower and decided that this just wasn't worth my time. It comes across as such an obvious attempt to pad out the game's otherwise rather short length. I might not have even had as much of a problem with collecting these cores if it weren't for the bewildering design decisions that seem, at times, intentionally frustrating.
ReCore's map is not insubstantial, and since you'll spend a good deal of time seeking out these prismatic cores, you'll be running through it a lot. Luckily there's a fast travel system. Unluckily, the fast travel system is terrible. At certain points in the over-world, you'll come across checkpoints between which you can teleport. This is fine, but in order to do so you actually have to move to one of these points first. This seems out-dated, as there's no reason you shouldn't be able to simply travel to one of these points from your map. On top of this, the fast travel map is different from the regular map. So, if you want to travel to a point that's close to a prismatic core you need to collect, well you'd better open up your standard map, memorize exactly where that core is in relation to you and the fast travel point, then access the fast travel terminal and teleport to that location. This is insanely tedious and after doing it for the forty-fifth time, it get's a little tiresome. There's also no way to place any sort of waypoint on the map or in the world. This is a complete oversight as you'll spend seemingly endless amounts of time reorienting Joule and checking the map to make sure you're headed in the right direction. Occasionally (very occasionally) the game will give you an in-world objective marker, but it would have alleviated so much unneeded frustration if they had just extended the ability to make custom waypoints to the player.
In addition, the very fundamentals of the game - the part where you’re taking robot frames out with you to explore the sands of Far Eden - are bogged down so incredibly by the fact that you can only take two frames out with you at any given time. This makes absolutely no sense. Allow me to paint a picture. You’re out in the over-world, you need one more prismatic core before you’re able to open up the door leading to the next floor of the game’s ultimate tower. You spot one on your map. You use Seth, the spider robot, to scale the track on the side of a derelict building. Once atop the building you use the flying robot to navigate your way over to the spot on your map that’s marked with a core, but whoops! Turns out you need Duncan, the ape robot frame to bust open a large rock in which the core is contained. Better open up the map, travel back to Joule’s base, switch out your robot team, find the spot again on your map and fast travel to the nearest checkpoint and hope that you’ve chosen the right combination of robot buddies to allow you to get the collectible this time. It is downright infuriating. Especially given the fact that there’s absolutely no justification as to why this couldn’t be done from a pause menu, or just in game like you can with the two frames you're allotted.
With these points in mind, there are things to like about ReCore. The movement feels good as you’ll double jump and air dash around floating platforms. Chaining jumps into wall crawling, into dashing to scale a tower has a sense of speed to it that’s really satisfying. The team has been smart about adding a reticule under Joule so you can always see where you’re going to land. There’s even some really trying platforming segments later in the game that make use of some disappearing and rotating platforms that can be fun to run through. That said, there were a number of times throughout the game where Joule wouldn’t grab onto a ledge I knew she should be able to reach, or miraculously clamber onto a platform that seemed out of her reach. There’s an inconsistency to it that can make you overly trepidatious when approaching larger jumps.
The combat also has kernels of interesting mechanics, they just never seem to go anywhere. Joule is armed with a rifle that can be decked out with different coloured ammo. The same colours as the cores of the robots you’ll be fighting. In a nutshell, the strategy is to match the colour of your gun to the colour of the corebots for extra damage. The robot frames can also be commanded to pull off an attack with varying degrees of damage based on which type of enemy you're fighting, though the robot attacks lack any sort of weight or punch. When your enemy's health is low enough, you’ll be able to extract their core with Joule’s handy wrist-tether-thing to gain energy that you can use to upgrade your core-bots, or completely destroy them to gain crafting parts. Juggling multiple enemies of multiple colours, dashing between them as to not get hit and choosing whether to extract their cores or destroy them completely is a fun little game in itself, but the problem is that it wears thin after a few hours. Stronger enemies take entirely too long to take down - the strongest of which are completely resistant to everything, becoming susceptible to damage seemingly at random - and the weaker enemies are an annoyance that pop up in the world when you’re trying to collect more cores.
Outside of the main dungeons, there are plenty of side dungeons to explore and - you guessed it - collect cores in. These dungeons break down into combat arenas and time trial platforming challenges. These are the areas where I had the best time in ReCore. The platforming dungeons encourage you to speed through the level, pulling off chains of double-jumps and air dashes to land on perilously thin platforms. The combat arenas are relatively straight-forward, but given that you're constrained to a specific location, it allows for a frantic combat encounters where you're switching back and forth between ammo types, and managing attacks with your robot buddies. All the dungeons have side objectives to complete that will determine what collectibles you'll achieve at the end. I'd run through a couple of these multiple times in attempting to get as much out of the dungeons as I could in an effort to quickly gather up as many cores as possible, and I might have continued with this intention, if it weren't for the game being such an unstable, buggy mess on the Xbox One.
Yes, truly one of the biggest reasons that I decided to stop playing ReCore were the numerous technical issues I encountered, making the game, at times, unplayable. The game's environments (especially the desert of Far Eden) are pretty. Nothing breathtaking, but nice to look at. When several enemies start attacking you in the over-world though, the frame-rate can slow to a crawl. This is nothing in comparison to the amount of times I would just fall through the world out of nowhere, however. Not to mention, several times on restarts the game simply wouldn't load crucial elements of the world. One puzzle has you timing out a jump where a large ball is blocking the blast from a laser. Well, after attempting the jump several times, the game just stopped loading in the big ball. There was no way I could make it past the obstacle. This resulted in me completely closing the application and restarting it, losing some progress in the procedure. I'm generally forgiving when it comes to bugs in games, (especially in 2016) but ReCore's issues on Xbox One are too much to look past.
I really wanted to like ReCore. I was excited to play through a game from the minds of ex-Metroid Prime developers. Hell, if you squint hard enough, you can still see some of the Metroid DNA hidden in ReCore's folds. Unfortunately what starts out as a promising adventure with your robot pals eventually breaks down into a buggy, monotonous collect-a-thon, that I really can't say I had much fun with at all. While there are things to like about ReCore, the bad far outweighs the good and is maybe better left on the scrap heap.