I gave ReCore a chance. In fact, I gave ReCore many chances. I probably gave ReCore more of a chance than most people. By my estimation, that means I’m dumber than most people. I could have been playing anything else for the past ten hours, but no, I had to be a stubborn jackass and vow to finally finish ReCore once and for all.
The first time I gave ReCore a chance was when it first game out. I rented it from Gamefly, a rental that, after two weeks, I still hadn’t received. I contacted Gamefly, they considered it lost, and they shipped me another. I received that one, and eagerly booted it up. I was prepared for what I was about to play, I knew a lot about the game by that point. And what I played was enjoyable, but not mind-blowing. I put an hour or two into it and then shipped it back to Gamefly, in favor of a newer game I was more excited for. What I experienced was a decent third person shooter/platformer that had a cool concept and a ton of performance issues.
The second time I gave ReCore a chance was when, about three months later, some random dude showed up in my driveway. I suppose I could’ve walked out there and greeted him with a smile, being all neighborly and shit, but I didn’t know this guy, so instead I just watched nervously through the blinds while he fumbled with my gate, then turned and left. After I was sure he was gone, and I wasn’t in danger of socializing, I walked out to see what he had done. Attached to my gate with a wooden clothespin was a Gamefly envelope that looked like it had been to hell and back, more than once. It was bent to shit and had both tire and footprints on it, for fuck’s sake. On the envelope was a note that said, “Was in my mailbox.” I opened it up and sure enough, it was the original ReCore game I had rented from Gamefly. Now, I don’t know if it had been sitting in this guy’s mailbox for three months, or if he got it earlier and just tossed it around his living room for 90 days before bringing it to me, or if the postal service literally lost that envelope for a quarter of a year. I’m assuming it was that last option. In any case, the game had been written off as a loss by Gamefly months ago, so I figured there was no harm in just keeping it. Besides, by this point, Gamefly was practically giving the thing away as a coaster, so they probably wouldn’t have wanted it back regardless. I didn’t have a whole lot going on at the time, so I popped it in and played it for… about the same three hours, until I literally hit a wall with a boss fight. It was right after a checkpoint and I was grossly under-leveled. It was a point-of-no-return that wasn’t telegraphed, so I was literally stuck. I would have to start over, but not yet.
Wait. A ginger on a desert planet? Yeah, that would go well.
So the game disc went into the binder with all the other case-less, orphaned game discs I’ve acquired over the years, most having old Blockbuster stickers or Hollywood Video serial numbers scribbled on them with a marker. There it stayed, until the “Definitive Edition” was announced. This was where the developers sat down, looked at their game, and said, “Holy shit, this game was only 70% completed and had a fuck ton of glitches and perfomance issues when we shoved it out the door. We should probably fix that.” So they did, apparently, and I was again tempted to boot it up. But I didn’t. The game had been patched to include a number of fixes, especially in the load time and frame rate department, but the Xbox One X was looming on the horizon, and I knew I was going to jump on that shit, so I decided to wait and enjoy the game on a much more capable system.
When I finally got my X, one of the first things I did was install ReCore and upgrade it to the Definitive Edition. I knew I’d have to start over, but enough time had passed where I felt like a fresh start would be required anyway. So I started… and played it for about an hour before I realized that, mentally, I just wasn’t “into it.” There were other, more exciting games to play at the time, so I decided to set it aside yet again, this time cataloging it into my newly created “Backlog Bingo” list, which it then rode on through the transition into the Backlog Barbecue.
Which brings us to… now. It’s safe to say that I have a history of not playing this game, so I sat down, fresh off the accomplishment of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, ready to put this game to rest once and for all.
I’ve finally put enough time into the game to get past the initial handful of “dungeons” and I have to say, this game kinda sucks. It’s a shame too, because for the longest time, I’ve wanted to like the game. When others trashed it for being sub-par, I defended it for being a AA-tier game in a world where everything had to be AAA. I believed in the vision that the creators had for ReCore.
And I still do. They just didn’t do it very well. The controls are tight and responsive, the traversal and platforming is cool and creative, but the combat sucks ass and the difficulty spikes are bullshit. You don’t improve Joule’s abilities, you use materials and resources to upgrade your robot companions by discovering new armor diagrams and by basically pouring red, blue, and yellow orbs into each of your bot’s corresponding categories. Your resource pool is shared between all of your bots, so leveling them up requires a lot of grinding. This wouldn’t be so bad if fighting the enemies wasn’t such a chore. More often than not, they’ll pop up out of the sand in groups, usually one strong corebot surrounded by a few weaker ones. The problem with this is that, while Joule’s health meter can be bumped up slightly by finding medical capsules, her defense is completely unaccessible. Leveling up her weapon will bump up her damage ever-so-slightly, but a single corebot can kill her with a few well placed projectiles. Trying to dodge blasts of fire on the ground and projectiles in the air without taking a few hits is near-impossible, and there’s no healing Joule on the fly, you have to flee or avoid damage long enough for her to recharge her health bar.
You’ll do this. A lot. Even if you don’t want to.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but some of the corebots can do so much damage, they’ll easily kill her with a few hits. Again, there’s nothing you can do about it. Leveling up your own robot allies helps, as they fight alongside you in battle, but no matter how strong they are, they’ll all become completely useless when a enemy bot captures them and starts carrying them off. 99% of the time, you’re too focused on avoiding ground attacks to look up and realize your ally is being captured. You’ll literally be fighting and fighting, tapping the Y button for your companion’s special attack, and wondering why the fuck they’re not doing it, only to realize they’re floating in the air a hundred yards away. It’s up to you to free them before they can help again, which means you’ll have to lock onto them and use your tow cable, or destroy the bot that’s carrying them. Good luck locking on to that shit when there are four enemy bots between you and them.
The ease at which Joule dies is extremely aggravating, but it’s something that could have been alleviated by having a more fun and cohesive hub world to run around in. To be fair, there are plenty of platforms to jump on, chests to find, and dungeons to discover, but they’re all spread out and vaguely walled off behind whatever special ability is needed to access it. Most of the time, a chest or prism core is tucked high up on a ledge with no clue as to how you’re supposed to get up there. Does it require a series of well-placed jumps? A little bit of help from your corebot friends? Or does it require equipment you’ve not only not obtained yet, but don’t even know is an option? There’s no way to know without wasting a decent chunk of time trying to access it in multiple ways, only to shrug and finally move on, in hopes of eventually getting something that will help you out. I’ve put about ten hours into the game as of this writing, and I’m fairly confident that more than half of that time was spent just jumping around trying to get to seemingly inaccessible platforms.
A perfect example is an optional dungeon that only requires 8 or 9 prism cores to access, but needs four of these little battery-type flying bots to “power” it up and open the door. Three of these bots were easy enough to get, but the fourth one is impossible to get to. It’s high on a pillar with nothing else around it. I clearly need something else to get it. So I moved on to the next story-based dungeon, where to my surprise I am supposed to find and assemble the pieces to a flying ally that I can use to get to higher ledges. Awesome! Mystery solved. Only one problem, the enemies in this dungeon are tough. Tougher than my little frail Joule can handle. I need to level her up some more, which is fucking ironic because the main reason I was trying to access the 9-core optional dungeon was to help level her up.
I’m okay with a challenge, but the balancing issues here are just too much. This is after the quality-of-life tweaks that were made to the game for the Definitive Edition. How did they overlook the fact that a dungeon that has a lower level requirement needs to be accessed using gear found in a harder dungeon? Who does that?
I’m tired of dying. I’m tired of yanking blue, yellow, and red orbs out of robots. I’m tired of shooting and shooting and shooting just to gain a slight amount of XP to contribute to Joule’s horrendously under-leveled gun. Most of all, I’m tired of jumping. So much jumping. Jump, jump, and jump again, only to realize that no, I can’t get to that platform after all. I have to go jump somewhere else for a while so that I can come back later and jump. I’m okay with backtracking, and revisiting areas I’ve already been to gain access to new ledges and loot, but after ten hours I still find myself wandering back to the very first area to get loot that I can finally access. I came back once when I finally got Seth, that allows me to latch onto special tracks. I came back again with Duncan, that can smash certain rocks. And now I would be expected to come back yet again to use the flying bot to access the higher pillars. No. No more backtracking. I’m done with the backtracking.
Sure, I could once again return it to the backlog, but honestly, at this point I’m ready to say ‘fuck it’ and put it away for good. I have to finally admit that this game is the piece of shit that everyone else was trying to convince me it was. It’s a shame too, because I love the idea of the game. But the execution resulted in a shoddy, uneven difficulty, an over-world hub that quickly loses its mystery and intrigue and a character leveling system that really doesn’t make much sense.
This game could actually benefit from a simpler design. Get rid of the metroid-vania style hub world, ditch the loot grind, give at least some sort of control over Joule’s own progression, and keep the brilliant platforming. Even a linear level setup could prove to be a good time.
Ultimately, the odds of a sequel to ReCore are probably worse than winning the lottery. The game apparently sold like shit and it doesn’t even really have any kind of cult following or fanbase. In other words, it was almost immediately forgotten. Well, by everyone except me, apparently.
Maybe it’s time to fix that.
