Recore Review

Played on Xbox One (base)

Developed by Armature Studio, Asobo Studio, Level-5 Comcept

Released 13th September 2016

Keiji Inafune, the graphic designer of the original Megaman and Street Fighter, had come up with this interesting concept of surviving a world that is on the brink of human extinction. This idea would continue to be built upon by Armature and started to include robots with souls and etc. Taking 14 months to enter full production, you'd expect Recore's world to be incredibly fleshed out with the most fascinating lore you've seen in a while.

Story

The story fails to be captivating. While it's not a huge pile of garbage, it doesn't attempt to be memorable or interesting. You play as Joule, a lone survivor on a planet named Far Eden accompanied by several companion bots. In the early 2020s, a virus named the Dust Devil Plague wiped out humanity and made Earth inhabitable, in return, an organisation named Mandate sent corebots and the first group of colonists to inhabit Far Eden while the corebots finished their terraforming. However, the corebots ended up corrupted and nearly all colonists went missing. The concept and ideas are strong and it's what hooked me into playing the game, however, the execution of the narrative fails. The game does succeed in portraying its charm and while I didn't care for what was happening when I did pay attention to some cutscenes, they were neither shocking and great nor horrendously bad. The game's story is just painfully average.

Gameplay

The gameplay is an arcade-style of fun. While the game refuses to go in-depth with its fundamentals, it still manages to balance demanding gameplay without it feeling overwhelming or too easy. The shooter aspect of the game focuses on matching the colour of your ammo to the opposing force you're fighting. It also blends in the swapping of core bot allies, using their abilities and cooldowns to your advantage, bobbing and weaving in between the enemies' attacks and deciding to finish the enemy off for either frame components or cores, both of which could be used to upgrade your corebots in different ways. This style of gameplay requires attention to all aspects to succeed fully, especially in the later and harder dungeons that you're required to complete.

While it gets repetitive near the end of the 12-hour journey, I fully loved this and enjoyed every moment of seeing my way-too-OP corebots slaughter enemies. Each core bot is special; Mack, the K-9 unit, can charge through enemies and search for hidden treasures. There's Seth, the SP-DR unit that shoots lasers and allows for grapple hook manoeuvres. There's Duncan, the AP-3 unit that destroys barriers and is the hardest-hitting. There are also 2 others but I found their usage quite minimal, rarely using them outside of points of progression. The game does force you to pick between two corebots to take with you which ends up being extremely infuriating as you're forced to head back through multiple 2-minute-long loading screens to equip the correct core bot to face against a certain puzzle. Need to smash through something but you have Mack and Seth equipped? Head back to equip Duncan. The game could've fixed this by having you manage all your corebots at once rather than repeat the same tedious runback. While you can't upgrade yourself (a missed opportunity), you can customise and craft different parts of your core bot frames using components, and mix-and-match cores and frames for varying abilities.

The platformer of Recore is well done. The laser-specific jumping controls and the use of your movement fluidly is a task that requires moderate levels of skill and mastery, something that I enjoyed thoroughly. The game, however, forces you into multiple halts in progress as to unlock a new area in the semi-open world, you are required to grind completionist levels of items that don't benefit you in gameplay in any shape or form. This extended the playtime by an unneeded amount of about 3 hours.

Bossfights

The boss fights would've been somewhat cool, however, they all ended up being bullet sponges and near-identical. The bosses were all a larger frame of the corebots you have, with a prismatic core as their centre. This means that they would constantly change their core colour which resulted in a minimal change of attacks. There was a heavily missed opportunity to introduce some crazy and new types of frames but, unfortunately, the game decides to play it safe and inevitability, boringly.

Victor as a final boss luckily served some more uniquity and intrigue as he could colour blind (a huge disadvantage considering the gameplay flows on the colour-coded enemies and ammo), and swap his colour core and frame. However, he suffered as a boss as I spent 20 minutes per attempt to kill him considering he's such a bullet sponge.

 

Characters

The characters in this game are minimal. In total, there are 3: Joule, Kai and the antagonist, Victor. While all the voice acting is extremely exaggerated and unconvincing in the emotional moments, the characters are somewhat likeable. Victor is a cut-and-dry cardboard cutout villain that honestly I was bored by, but Joule was interesting in regards to her personality, same with Kai. They didn't deliver any hard-hitting performances but they didn't make me cringe or sigh each time they spoke. Just like the story, they were 'meh'.

 

Atmosphere

The atmosphere of the game is not at all intriguing. While the desert glare and mixture of almost-alien technology contrasting the sweeping sands is gorgeous, that's all it offers. The environment always looks like this and doesn't differ except for the dungeons which are essentially still the same but with a cave aesthetic. The soundtrack is nothing spectacular either, no resonating tune that'll get stuck in my head or make me think about the game. I do have to compliment the great contrast between the futuristic scrap and the wasteland fields one more time as it's a great job done.

 

Story- 6/10

Gameplay- 7.5/10

Bossfights- 6/10

Characters- 6/10

Atmosphere- 6/10

mediocre

Microsoft lands with yet another mediocre exclusive in its catalogue, failing to make a splash in the industry.

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