Recore was a game that seemed cool but I knew basically nothing about outside of the very basic premise from the E3 reveal so many years ago. I'd heard it was plagued with terrible technical issues and loading times back at launch, and the game was quite clearly badly optimized and not even content-complete. I'd also heard that the definitive edition had fixed that up really well, and my experience playing it fits that hearsay well. I never played original Recore, but I really enjoyed my time with the definitive edition. It took me around 22 hours to get all but a couple collectibles and I also left a couple dungeons un-100%'d.

Recore is the story of a girl named Joule, a girl all alone on an alien world known as Far Eden save for her robot dog named Mack. It turns out though that Mack isn't actually the dog, but the core powering the K9 frame, and over the course of the game you'll get more corebots as well as a total of 5 frames to plonk them in as you unravel the mystery of why this planet is so desolate, why you're all alone on it, and why it's covered in horrible killer corebots. The story isn't anything super special to write home about, but it's done well enough. What's especially great are the corebots themselves. Their designs are good, but the animations on your companions just bring SO much life to them. Especially the way the dog frame will bounce around happily wagging its tail, run forward to where you're gonna go to try and lead you there. I found it very endearing, and it brought some well-needed levity to a story that can be pretty bleak and dark at times.

Recore is a really weird kinda game to describe that isn't really like anything else I've played. I imagine it might be somewhat like Metroid Prime, but not having played much of that, I can't say for sure. Either way, this product from Keiji Inafune and the Metroid Prime team plays like something between Metroid Prime, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey (the latter two not having been released yet when this game came out in 2016, for what it's worth). And it all kinda works in the end? At least it did for me. XD

There are 5 large, sub-open worlds with things scattered about them. You can just follow the story, or you can explore around looking for prismatic cores. The world isn't quite as tightly designed as Breath of the Wild, but how much you can just wander around these big areas looking for dungeons (which have a very BotW shrine-like feel to them) or misc activities to do for prismatic cores, health powerups, or crafting materials really scratched the same itch for me that BotW did. Prismatic cores are very much like Mario Odssey's moons in how you go around and hunt for them, and you need a certain amount of them to open up certain gates to let the story progress. Then the Metroid Prime bit comes from how you unlock new traversal abilities to go back to earlier areas to get goodies you couldn't access before as well as how this is a shooter with a lock-on mechanism.

Unpacking all of that a little at a time, the exploration and platforming feel great. The game controls fantastically, and Joule moves really tightly with her two jumps and an air dash. The dungeons are either combat trials, platforming trials, or mini-adventure (like proper little dungeons) ones. Each have a secret key to collect, 8 floating switches to find and shoot, and a time limit to do it all in, with each of those getting you a treasure for doing it. Do all three in one go and you get an extra bonus treasure. Interesting areas on the overworld where goodies may lie are signposted very well with bright glowy material collectibles that function like coins in Mario: they're a sign to where the action is.

The platforming SHOULD feel a lot more fiddly than it does, but it doesn't. Good camera control, a generous ledge-climbing feature, and a bright yellow circle indicating directly underneath you all help contribute to this. Even when I was just searching the world with a fine-toothed comb for prismatic cores, I was having fun because of how fluid and easy it is to move the character through the environment.

Another thing helping that was the combat. Joule has a rifle that can swap between white, red, blue, and yellow. Enemies also come in these colors (or combinations of them), and shooting them with the matching color does WAY more damage. You also have up to two corebots at a time in one of five frames. Each of the three colors of corebot has a special attack that corresponds to each frame (blue more quick & damaging, yellow more defensive, and red is damage & damage over time), and both your corebots and enemy corebots function this way. You unlock more corebot frames to use as you progress through the story, giving you more combat options as well as more traversal abilities to go back and nab more goodies with.

You can find blueprints and materials to upgrade your corebots (basically better weapons & armor), as well as rare silly-looking ones with special abilities. There's also a neat mechanic where killing an enemy outright will drop materials for crafting armor, but extracting its core when its weak gives you more energy that you'll need to use to boost your corebots stats (they're SUPER weak if you don't boost their stats, and they're killing machines if you keep up on boosting them). Tie that all in with a combo system that gives you more damage output as you keep dealing damage and avoiding taking it, and you have a combat system that I never got bored with. I know a common complaint for this game is that the combat gets repetitive, but I never found that a problem. There's a decent amount of enemy variety, and the level scaling is really viscous (it's pretty uncommon to fight stuff below your level unless you're REALLY backtracking), so there's always an element of danger especially to overworld-wandering enemies.

The combat's biggest fault is that it doesn't give the player enough information. You can die SO fast (for basically the entire game, even the first corebots you meet hit really hard) that if you're caught off-guard by something, that can be a death right there (although luckily death respawns are nearly instant). This game really could've used something like Dad of War's ring around the player that points towards incoming attacks, because sometimes you're SO overwhelmed with enemies there's just nothing you could've done to not die. It can sometimes feel like you just had no control over whether or not you lived or died and you just didn't get lucky enough.

Part of this is certainly down to how the game handles its combat. You have a lock-on for your gun as well as air-dashes and a double jump. A big part of combat is avoidance and constantly moving, and once you get the hang of that and also start using your corebots special abilities as much as possible, you'll start dying a LOT less. That said, you can still stagger from stuff like fire REALLY hard, and the screen is often so busy that no matter where you are in the game, you're never entirely safe from a death that will feel like it was unfair. It's certainly not how the bulk of the combat feels, but it's a frequent enough problem that it alone is more or less what keeps me from recommending this game as highly as I WANT to recommend it.

Presentation is a mixed bag. The graphics are pretty for an earlier Xbone game, but nothing super outstanding. The previously mentioned corebot personality is definitely the strongest part of the game's presentation. The environments don't have a toooon of variety, as most are just the craggy desert that makes up the surface of Far Eden. Either that, or underground caverns or tech facilities. It's not allll the same, but it feels pretty samey. The music is also nothing to write home about, and sometimes the VA is pretty bad too. Especially for the tank-related new content they added for the definitive edition, Joule's VA sounds like she's really phoning it in for some bits of dialogue where her tone will be weirdly detached from the emotional content it seems the words she's saying should have.

Performance on my base-model Xbone was mostly fine. If you're looking over a huge vista with tons of stuff on-screen, you're gonna get some framerate dips, but the game never stuttered in a way that affected how I was playing it in a meaningful way. Loading times are generally pretty quick if not instant (for things like respawns after death or fast-travel within the same region), so that's nice. The only really noticeable problems are things like texture maps REALLY freaking out some times in the Shifting Sands area, or texture/model pop-in being pretty noticeable as well. Not stuff that bothered me at all, but if you're someone who would be bothered by that, you're probably better off getting Recore on PC or on an Xbone X.

Verdict: Recommended. The combat issues keep me from giving this the highly recommended I really wanna give it, but it's still a game I enjoyed a ton. I really had no idea what I was going in for, and I was very pleasantly surprised by the end of it. This game is easily worth its $20 digital price tag or going through if you happen to have Game Pass if you like action/adventure games and platformers. It's not Dad of War and it's not Breath of the Wild, but it's honestly close enough that I really hope Microsoft lets this team revist Recore someday. With some tightening up mechanically, this yet-to-be-a-series could be something really really special. Microsoft have a Nier on their hands with Recore, and if they were so inclined to give it another entry in the series, I think they could easily give it its Automata.

As much as it pains me to talk poorly on a unique game, this is one of those times.

Recore reeks of "next gen transitional hot mess with good concepts". It has a lot of neat ideas, a neat concept, a pretty cool story, but on the whole, the game fails simply because of either quality of life necessities that are bizarrely absent or the fact that it just...isn't that good to begin with. It's an ambitious title, for sure, especially only a few years into the Xbox One's lifespan, and yet somehow it fails at almost every aspect it sets it sights on.

First off, you inexplicably cannot set waypoints on the map. It's an open world game, with a billion Ubisoft type markers dotting the span of it, and yet you can't set waypoints to help you find things easier. Secondly, the fact that you have to travel back to a Crawler every single time to switch cores is absurd. That simply adds far too much backtracking in a game that's, let's face it, extremely empty and not interesting to look at. I don't mind backtracking, but good lord even I have my limits.

Recore is a prime example of a game that simply couldn't live up to what it wanted, primarily because it seemed the people who made it didn't know what to do with it or how to do it. And the worst part of it all is that everything that's wrong with it isn't even mechnical. It could've easily been avoided. Because for all intents and purposes, the game plays like butter. It's fun to control, easy to handle, everything makes sense in that scheme. The crafting is uninspired, sure, but rarely is crafting not uninspired, so that isn't really fair to criticize. Some folks say the combat is repetitive without realizing that that's what video games inherently are to begin with. It's biggest detriment isn't its UI or its controls or anything mechanical. In fact, it's biggest detriment is its setting, and its utter inability to utilize it in any meaningful or interesting way.

But the party system, and lack of ability to change core frames outside of the Crawler, is, in my opinion, the outright biggest mechanical sin the game offers. You can travel across two large swaths of map, only to reach your destination and find out, guess what, you don't have the right frame for the core you need to use. Then you have to go all the way back to the Crawler just to switch it, and then walk all the way because the only fast travel are specific points, and rarely are they nearby your actual destinations. This lack of thought towards a gamers time is, quite frankly, the kind of thing that makes someone stop playing altogether.

It was said to be somewhat inspired by games like Metroid and Mega Man, which makes sense in terms of the robotic overtones and the general worldbuilding, but not in the gameplay. At all. Those are not what a game like this should be like. They just don't mesh well. Recore is, at its core, tonally inconsistant, and unsure of what it's trying to do or what it's trying to be. If it had just been a rather linear adventure action game, it would've succeeded. If it had been an open world game but with the proper tools to achieve it, it would've succeeded. Instead, what we get is a game that doesn't know its ass from a hole in the ground because conceptually it's all over the damn place.

I really don't like being this critical of something that I, on the surface, appreciate, because I love things that think outside the box and try to do something totally different than the rest of the industry. But this is one of those times where it simply didn't work, and that's what's disappointing is realizing what Recore could've been instead of what we got. The game isn't by any means unplayable, and I'm sure some will find fun in the never ending grind and backtracking (things that, again, I don't always have a problem with until they make me have a problem with them), but Recore is one of those very rare examples of a game that, frankly, should've been approached entirely differently gameplay wise than the way it was.

It's like they got so much right, then stuck it in the wrong genre. It's quite baffling, honestly.

That being said, I appreciate what they tried to do, I really do. I just wish they had managed to make what the game could've been instead of what it turned out to be. But I applaud their ambition, their inventiveness, their unique ideas nonetheless. Even in the biggest letdowns, there are aspects to appreciate. Recore is cool, that's for sure. It just isn't fun. And when it comes to gaming, fun is the most important aspect.

PS2 game trapped in 2017. The definitive edition is a good update that fixed most complaints people had with the original game. ReCore consists of different areas to explore, and you can find upgrades for your robot companions and search out other collectibles. Each area also has multiple dungeons. Combat consists of matching the color of the bullets you're firing to the color of the enemies; doing so boosts the damage done. The platforming is also really good, and exploring the world is rewarding yet fun enough on its own with many traversal options such as gliding, double jumping, boosts, and latching onto climable walls. The final dungeon is a bit lame and stretched out, but it's not as bad as people say. The biggest complaint I see is areas being blocked off for not having enough of a certain collectable; even the final boss will be if you don't have enough. Personally, getting them wasn't hard or tedious, but how many you needed also could have been lowered a bit. The plot sort of exists, but it serves more as a backdrop for the world around you. It took me 15 hours to beat the game, and it is definitely worth the playthrough.

Pues me ha encantado. Es justo lo que me apetecía jugar en estos momentos y me ha sentado genial, el gameplay es súper fresco y las peleas muy divertidas y dinámicas.

La estética me flipa, lo postapocaliptico debe ser una de mis debilidades. La historia no está mal aunque podría haberse desarrollado más y habría estado bastante mejor.

Ojalá hicieran la secuela en algún momento, lo necesita.