Stranded on a desert planet, it’s up to Joule and her robot pals to figure out what exactly went wrong with humanity’s salvation and try to get things back on track. The premise, Metroid-like gameplay and low cost of ReCore are certainly intriguing. Unfortunately, it bogs itself down in poor combat and excruciating wait times.
Players start out just like heroine Joule, lost and confused about what is going on. To look for answers, Joule heads out with her robo-dog companion Mack and stumbles upon all sorts of clues to piece the story together.
Gameplay-wise, ReCore feels similar to a mix between Metroid and last year’s Mad Max. Aside from the obvious desert setting, ReCore features a similar open-world aspect, with side-missions of all different difficulty levels to tackle at any time. Similar to Metroid games, you’ll need to unlock certain allies to use their abilities to access and complete these missions.
Each mission centers around a cave, basically. You need a certain amount of these power cores and a minimum level to access each cave, and the rewards for each one include power cores, blueprints to craft upgrades and more. Each mission also comes with multiple optional objectives, allowing for replayability to unlock all the rewards.
There are two other robot sidekicks in addition to Mack that get unlocked as the story progresses, the climbing spider-bot and the strong ape-bot. Each ally has a special ability, such as accessing new parts of the map, or in Mack’s case, digging up helpful goodies from under the sand.
The first few hours, things were going along pretty smoothly. There are four main colored enemies in ReCore: red, yellow, blue and white. These can also mix to form hybrid enemies. Your gun has corresponding color firing modes, so expect to be pressing the D-pad often during fights to change your firing mode.
Combat, while shallow, is kept engaging by trying to rack up high combos. The more enemies you shoot, and the lower you bring down their health, the higher your combo meter raises. You can also extract the cores from enemies, initiating a tug-of-war-style mini-game to yank the cores from enemy robots. These cores can be used to craft powerful upgrades for your ally bots.
There’s also a lot of platforming. Joule wears an exo-suit that gives you a double-jump and a dash move. These combine with the spider-bot’s climbing ability to provide for some fun platforming segments. There are some hiccups with puzzles, but it never took me more than a few tries to figure out each segment.
All this sounds fine until you start to see the cracks in the game. The biggest issue by far is the loading times. Fast-traveling is anything but that, and dying will make you want to change to a different game. These loading times can often go for a minute and a half each; I’ve timed them. You fast-travel outside of a cave, wait a minute and a half to get there, then go through the doors of the cave, initiating another 90-second loading screen. What if you die right on the other side? You’ve effectively waited over four minutes for a combined 20 seconds of gameplay. These loading screens add up, and can drive you insane.
Additionally, combat can feel cheap, especially when out in the open. There’s one area referred to as the Shifting Sands. It’s a vast expanse of nothing much, littered with different enemies. Often while fighting off one group of enemies, another group of two or more will get close enough to attack as well. You’ll be so focused on the first group of enemies, you get blindsided from behind with the second group you had no idea existed.
Meanwhile, in more confined areas or caves, these problems are virtually non-existent. Encounters are paced much better, and usually the cave ends with an exciting boss battle.
And not to sound too petty, but ReCore isn’t exactly the best looking game. Animations are jerky, mouth-syncing with the (quite good) voice acting doesn’t match up well and the graphics just aren’t anything memorable. Everything works and looks fine, but this game definitely lacks the polish that normally comes with consoles exclusives like Gears of War or Forza.
That said, ReCore is only $39.99. For all the frustrations I’ve had with it, that’s a pretty solid deal. There’s a lot of replayability here among all of the different side-missions. When it’s all running well, things are really fun. When the wait times start stacking on top of each other and the seemingly unfair open gameplay sets in, the fun grinds to a halt.
Despite the issues, I do still recommend people pick up ReCore. With a lower price, fun gameplay and an original IP, this could be the start of a trend for a revived mid-tier level of gaming, once found prominently on the N64 and early PlayStation consoles. If the success of ReCore sees more moderately priced, interesting games like this come out, that would be a success unto itself. And who knows, maybe the loading times will be fixed in a future update.
So what do you think? Are you interested in trying out ReCore for yourself? Do you want to see more mid-level games release as well? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
