I feel like one major component of the gaming industry that is missing anymore is the lack of middle-ground or ‘AA’ games. Previous console generations, even into the PS3’s lifetime, had a healthy mix of these type of games, but I don’t think modern platforms have or will have that same type of selection again. Instead, we have a plethora of indies, most forgettable, and then your big budget AAA sequels — a good number of which are also forgettable — and little else left in between.
This was one reason that ReCore piqued my interest at E3. Besides being new IP, it was single player focused and also seemed to have enough scale to take it well beyond budge and indie range but not quite as predictable nor as tightly controlled as a AAA. The game released to a lot of critical groans last week, but my experience, and those of many others, has been far more positive and enjoyable. ReCore feels like a game made for that AA tier. Surprisingly, it’s only $40, although it could have easily been a $60 release, we’ve certainly had far less competent games priced at $60. To start at $40 already means this game is going to be $20 or less by Christmas, and probably free on Xbox Live next summer, but, had I paid $60 for this I would not have been disappointed.
That said, let’s take a step back to examine what ReCore offers. From a high-level view it’s an open world, third person, sci-fi action adventure platformer with a major RPG element — it covers a lot of genres to be sure. It’s single player only too, which I consider a positive. The players takes control of Joule, a twenty-something girl who awakens from cryo sleep aboard her Crawler, a large ship that’s been lying dormant in the sands of a nearby planet called Far Eden. Earth’s gone to hell in the near future and colonization on Far Eden had begun, with Joule’s missing scientist dad spear-heading many of the efforts. To help the humans and to otherwise get a lot of things done in the harsh dust storm environments of Far Eden, robots with cores were created. When Joule awakens, her robotic dog Mack is ready to help, but they quickly realize that many cores have become corrupt and are actually serving some other new ‘master’ and Joule has to figure out who that is and put a stop to its plans.
Joule wears an exoskeleton that gives the player instant dash and double jump ability, as well as the combined ability to double jump and then dash. You also carry a pulse rifle that has unlimited ammo, although after a while it requires a brief cooldown period to be able to fire again (in practice, this is a non-issue). The rifle gets augmented with color-coded ammunition, which means that if you shoot at a bad robot with a red core, you’ll do more damage (and possibly cause fire damage). Neutral (white), Blue (shock damage), and Yellow attributes are made available as you progress through the story.
Joule is always accompanied by one or up to two of her robotic friends that help her in both combat and in environmental traversal and exploration. Interestingly, one such robot, the tank, is likely going to arrive as DLC, for some reason this particular character did not make it into the final game, but you still have four uniquely capable ‘bots to discover and use as you progress the story. Anyway, the new aids are revealed at regular intervals and they literally open up new areas for you to explore. During my first hours for example, there were these broken bridge like pieces that I saw but they weren’t anything I could work with. Later on, when I got far enough in the story to reach Seth, the spider-like core, I was then able to revisit areas and get up to these new locations to uncover their secrets, as well as (naturally) go to all new areas that I had to get to to advance the story.
The world of Far Eden is pretty large, and thankfully there are easy to find fast travel terminals that you can use to get around. You can also return to your crawler at anytime to manage all of those cores and dozens of parts you’ve discovered. Side note — I thought it was really cool that the edges of the explorable area of Far Eden kept you at bay with dangerous radiation. This reminded me of STALKER, one of my favorite games, always a cool thing. Anyway, components can be fused and combined together to make better pieces, and by using blueprints, you can create new parts to your robotic buddies to make them more damage resistant, stronger, and so forth. I’ll admit the Core Fusion tutorial and menus were confusing the first few times I went to use them, and you do have to pay attention to the fact that you can spend a lot of resources on building things that you cannot actually equip yet. Still, while a little clumsy, this is helpful and fairly interesting additional mechanic that makes the game that much more robust.
Within the first hour I found a lot to like about ReCore that kept me playing. The story, characters, and combat mechanics were cool. I liked using the Extractor to yank cores out of enemies, it reminded me of Folklore on the PS3, another one of those fresh IP, ‘AA’ games I was alluding to earlier. You can also just destroy enemies by continuing to attack them, but their item drops will not include their core if you do that. Mixing up your attacks, both from the rifle and from your aids, along with timing combos, is engaging and fun. Joule’s extra abilities afforded to her by the exoskeleton also allow for super-human traversals, which gave the game a welcomed Crackdown feeling in that I was constantly looking up or in the distance (awesome draw distance by the way), thinking about what structure or rock formation I was wanting to top next. I liked that there are no collectibles for the sake of being collectibles (unlike Crackdown). Discovered items are either more cores and parts for your inventory, a new blueprint, or these specific, very fancy cores that you do have to stockpile in order to open enough doors and activate enough in-game items to advance the story. It’s definitely worth picking up these Prismatic Cores when you can because you’re going to need a huge stash of them at the end of the game.
As I mentioned at the top, Recore’s pros outweigh its cons, but as with anything it’s not without some of the latter. I have heard of complaints of major bugs, technical issues, and super long load times, but I’m not experiencing these on my Xbox One S, or at least certainly not to game-breaking degree for an otherwise really fun $40 game. Load times are indeed noticeably long at times, but typically only when leaving the Crawler or entering a whole new hub, but even then, they’re not insanely long. Moreover, a lot of checkpoint loads are nearly instant. Case in point, one major technical flaw I had was a large room where the floor looked really weird — as I took a step on it, Joule fell into an abyss, and moments later a checkpoint had to reload. It was just a couple of seconds and had me positioned just outside of the room that was broke moments earlier, only this time it was not broke. I got lucky with the checkpoint positioning there, but my point is that load times were really short right there and the technical issue was a one-off type, not a persistent one. Plus, let’s be honest — any ambitious game gets patched after release, so it’s reasonable to expect some further patching with ReCore.
To the summary…
