Beat ReCore: Definitive Edition on Xbox Series X today. It does not have any X enhancements but it may be relevant because on launch the game was infamous for awfully long loading times and generally bad performance and it performed perfectly well for me.
So, ReCore is a game that briefly had a big hype after its reveal but then it had a terrible launch, scoring only 58 on Metacritic but that didn't scare me off. I didn't know much about it other than that it's one of last gen's few Xbox exclusives and supposed to be some sci-fi open world game in a desert environment. Now I'm very glad that I checked it out because in its current form it's at least a 7/10 game for me that also happens to have a pretty cool and unique formula.
It's actually a 3D platformer with shooting elements and the only games it really reminds me of are Ratchet & Clank and Returnal with the addition of metroidvania and RPG elements. You assume the role of Joules, a young woman who was part of an expedition meant to terraform a distant planet called Far Eden because Earth is being ravaged by something called Dust Devil and mankind has to evacuate. But of course something has gone wrong: she wakes up far too late and alone, accompanied only by her robotic dog companion Mack, and all the robots that were supposed to prepare the planet while the humans are in cryo sleep aren't doing their job and attacking her on sight instead. So the goal is obviously to find out what happened and make sure the terraforming project succeeds.
On the outside it's kinda reminiscent of Enslaved and Horizon in that it's a sci-fi game about some tech-savvy ginger woman fighting animal robots but the gameplay formula is luckily very different and things start making sense when you consider that it was some Japanese-American cooperation. The narrative and graphical style are very western but the gameplay is very arcadey. You usually simply lock onto enemies, you can perform combos of dashes and double jumps, as you kill enemies a combo meter rises which unlocks attacks which allow instantly destroying a machine - it's primarily about maneuvering between all the enemies and their attacks, hence my comparison to Returnal. And between the combat you get a lot of exploration and platforming, with some sequences requiring pretty hardcore combinations of jumps, dashes and grapples while changing directions in mid-air, hence also my comparison to Ratchet & Clank. ReCore isn't as polished or smartly designed as those two but it does get surprisingly close. There aren't many games like this so that alone makes it worth checking out IMO if you're into this kind of stuff.
ReCore also does a whole bunch of original things and this is where things get pretty weird. None of these things are quite as good as it may seem at first but as things become more challenging and you need to learn the ropes it also turns out that it's not as dumb as it may seem at first. The one thing is that enemies come in different colours and you and your AI companion have attacks that match those. There is no planning involved here, you never know what colour the enemies are going to have and you just switch your gun's colours on the fly to match the current enemy. You can always also pick two companions with colours of your choice, between whom you can switch at any moment, but either you happen to have the right companion colour or you don't. It's very central tot he game but doesn't really contribute much because just matching colours is a pretty mindless thing to do - remembering that green enemies are vulnerable to both yellow and blue is the extent of its complexity. HOWEVER, the fact alone that you have to manage something other than moving and shooting and decide which enemies to attack at which moments makes the game a little bit more interesting than it would have been without this stuff.
What's more interesting is the progression, I guess. Your gun and your AI cores (the personalities of your companions) just level up and become more powerful as you go. But like in many old platform games you have to collect "prismatic cores" which are effectively keys required for making progress in the main story and which involve exploring the world and overcoming platforming and combat challenges, sometimes in the form of optional intense dungeons. I like that. What's a bit more interesting is that the AI cores are separate from their bodies and can be transferred between them which determines what special attacks your companions are going to have and that's important. You can beef up your AI cores' stats by farming certain currencies based on the enemy colour, but you also collect new body parts for your robots which must then be crafted from other enemy parts and you get either those currencies or crafting components depending on whether you killed your enemies normally or by ripping out their cores.
I found all of this very confusing at first but as the game became more challenging and I started thinking more deeply about how it works I actually found that it's a somewhat interesting system and the game became a lot easier when I figured things out and started to put more thought into how my robots are configured and what I farm more actively. I also found a few more nuances in the combat system, like that ripping out cores (which takes the form of a kinda "fishing" mini game) also heals you a lot and since driving up your combat meter unlocks the ability to instantly rip out a core I started to make more decisions mid-combat, i.e. in which order to kill enemies to drive up the combo meter, heal and quickly take care of tougher enemies. Or in the platforming I discovered that you can actually jump a lot further if you dash off a ledge because than you can perform two jumps and another dash in mid-air, which makes some of the platforming sequences pretty interesting and satisfying.
The game is far from perfect, there are a few issues with collision detection, your robots' attacks often look very similar to enemy attacks and it becomes unclear what you have to evade and so on and some fights are pretty frustratingly difficult. A few times I cursed about smaller details like being able to get stun locked or my dash seemingly not being enough to evade certain attacks in any way. However, all in all I found the game to be very satisfying in the end and the high challenge of a few sequences made me enjoy it a lot more when I finally made it.
Otherwise... it looks decent, it sounds great (especially the symphonic rock soundtrack was surprisingly good - at least at times), it usually controls great, the story wasn't half bad and actually I really wanted to get to the bottom of things and tried to solve the big mystery in advance (which I did) and it was decent. And when I checked out the changes from the Definitive Edition I figured that yeah, it's a very different game now than it must have been on release and comes with pretty good additional content (which was arguably cut from the game before its original release). It's not so good that I'd do all the optional content that's still left after beating the main quest line (mostly additional challenge dungeons) but I had a very good time with it. If you're stuck with an Xbox One or Series and are jealous of Ratchet & Clank or Returnal, this is a surprisingly good alternative. It's not a fantastic metroidvania game, it could have been a lot better with a few more RPG elements such as actual quests and NPCs but in my opinion it's good.
Post edited November 27, 2022 by F4LL0UT
