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.
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.