We’ve gotten used to retro throwback games from indie devs,
but a PS2-era action platformer for the Xbox One from Microsoft of all
publishers is the last thing anyone expected.
That is what ReCore is, though.
An oldschool-style 3D action platformer with impossibly videogame-y
physics, enemies that burst into piles of loot, loads of hidden collectibles,
and a myriad of other little touches that make you feel like the game would be
right at home on a PS2 or OG Xbox. It
sounds like a recipe for nostalgic success, but ReCore is seriously hampered by
extremely long load times and frequent glitches that really ruin the
experience. You’ll want to love it, but
ReCore just won’t let you. See all of
the details in our review.Game Details
- Publisher: Microsoft
- Developer: Comcept, Armature
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen
- Genre: Third-Person-Action
- Pros: Fun combat; friendly bots are awesome; solid platforming; very charming overall
- Cons: Very long load times; glitches; some questionable design decisions
- MSRP: $40
ReCore takes place on a planet called New Eden that was
selected for terraforming and human colonization after Earth was hit with
disease and other awfulness. Robots
were sent long in advance to terraform the desert planet and make it livable
before the colonists arrived, but something went wrong. Your character, Joule, is a human engineer
sent along with the terraforming robots and was supposed to be woken up out of
stasis at the first sign of trouble so she could fix it. That didn’t happen, though, as she wakes up
decades and decades too late. The
planet isn’t terraformed. The robots
have gone rogue and taken over the planet.
And the human colonists never showed up. What is going on?
To solve all of those mysteries, Joule sets out onto the planet
to investigate and try to re-start the terraforming equipment. Gameplay-wise, ReCore is a
third-person-action game with shooting combat as well as platforming and it
actually feels surprisingly great to play.
The controls are startlingly good and moving around and jumping from
platform to platform, and even double jumping and air dashing thanks to a brief
rocket thrusts, feels amazing. None of
it uses realistic physics, either, as Joule can stop on a dime, change
direction mid-air, and reach top running speed immediately, which is a huge
contrast to most modern games.
The great oldschool-style gameplay feel is present in the
shooting as well. The game is a
third-person-shooter with heavy auto-aim and lock on assist to the point that
you just hold the left trigger to lock on and the right trigger to shoot and
Joule automatically annihilates a whole room full of enemies. There are also different colored enemies
that are weak to different colored ammo types, so have to also switch ammo via
the D-Pad during combat as well as fire charged shots or even yank out the
enemy robot power cores. It all sounds
dead simple, but it is rather satisfying in practice. Of course, the game also throws in more powerful enemies that you
have to dodge around and can’t simply blast away at, too, and the combination
of the great feeling movement and the lightning fast combat makes the game a
ton of fun to play. Combat encounters
are fast and frenzied and the platforming is smooth and fun. All good so far, right?
The good times continue with the presence of Joule’s friendly robot companions. Mack is a dog robot that helps find buried treasure. Seth is a spider bot that can crawl around on set tracks (sort of like the spider ball in Metroid Prime) to reach previously unreachable areas. And Duncan is an ape-like bot who is the strongest attacker and can break certain rock formations. Each of them has their own personalities and are incredibly endearing and loveable.
Here’s where the wheels kind of fall off in ReCore,
though. The game is technically open
world but it is split into smaller sections and dungeons. Every time you enter a different area, or go
back to Joule’s crawler base, or when you die, the game has to load. And it loads and load and loads and loads,
sometimes for more than 2-minutes at a time and depending what you’re doing you
might sit through multiple loading screens all within a few minutes of each
other. All of that loading really adds
up and totally sucks the fun out of the game.
ReCore is only around 8-hours long total, and you spend probably a third
of that looking at loading screens. The
load times are simply unacceptably, unforgivably long.
ReCore is also incredibly glitchy, too. You’ll fall through the floor or get stuck
in loops where the game keeps respawning you in impossible space so you can’t
actually play. Sometimes enemies won’t
spawn into a room like they’re supposed to so a door that requires you to kill
all of the enemies won’t ever open.
There are countless other issues as well. ReCore is insanely glitchy.
Also, for as fun as ReCore can genuinely be when everything
works, there are lots of other little niggling issues that add up into major
annoyances. You can bring two of your
robot companions with you out into the world, but you don’t always know which
ones you actually need when you head out so there are lots of occasions where
you trek all the way across the map to do something only to find you don’t have
the bot you need. So then you have to
fast travel back to base – with long load time – choose the right bot, and head
back out – with long load time. The
game also has an annoying problem where mission markers just straight up
disappear so you don’t know where you’re supposed to go and you can’t set
destination markers on your map. You
can also upgrade your companions with the parts and blueprints you collect, but
the upgrade process is extremely slow and tedious.
As far as the presentation goes, ReCore is actually fairly
polished. It isn’t particularly
graphically impressive, but the sandy environments look nice, Joule looks good,
the bots – both friendly and enemy – look very cool. The lighting is also very nice, and the game runs at a solid
framerate. The sound is also very good
with a fantastic soundtrack and good voice acting.
It honestly is a shame that ReCore has so many core
(get it?) issues that sour the experience so much because there is a lot to
like here when it all works. It really
does start off fantastically well, but the problems get more frequent and more
annoying the deeper you get into the game, which just kills any joy you might
have previously felt. ReCore probably
needed more time in development to iron these things out. As it stands right now I just can’t give it
a recommendation even at the “bargain” $40 MSRP it launched at.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
