ReCore has a lot of cool ideas and sometimes those come together into a really fun game but just as often they fall apart leave you with a frustrating mess.

The combat is the biggest weakness. It's easy to feel very overwhelmed by enemies due to sheer number of things they throw out at once, the very hard-to-see indicators for things outside of your view, and the lock-on not functioning very well in general. When only faced with two or three enemies it's fine but when it locks you into a small arena with seven or eight enemies, it's a massive pain to get anything done. Then, when you're out in the overworld, having enemies constantly pop up out of the sand feels like a nuisance after the first handful of hours.

The platforming usually feels quite nice. The combo of double jumping and boost dashing feels great. Then, throw in the spider climb and glider robot for some extra spice here and there and it's actually pretty good. But when I got into the dungeons that offer 'challenges' it starts to get messy. It's not always clear what they're asking you to do and so I ended up having to trial-and-error my way through it, occasionally feeling like I accomplished it in some unintended method that ultimately leaves it feeling very unsatisfying.

The story and writing isn't really anything special. It's not particularly good but it's not particularly bad. It gets the job done and nothing more.

I got the game on sale for five dollars and it's hard to recommend for getting if you'd have to spend more than that. It's a bundle of cool ideas that are interesting to see but it's too often veers into un-fun frustration to really be recommendable.