ReCore review: the first six hours are really good

With an interesting concept, an all-star development team and Microsoft's backing, ReCore was poised to kick off the annual video game avalanche with a bang. Unfortunately, while it's undoubtedly a worthwhile and enjoyable game, some significant issues keep it from being a must-play.

At first blush the game might appear to be a simple run-and-gun in a beautiful desert, but digging a little deeper reveals a clever, modern riff on classic adventure platforming games like Metroid, Castlevania and Mega Man.

This is exactly what you'd hope to see from a collaboration between Comcept (founded by long-time Mega Man producer Keiji Inafune) and Armature (founded by former Metroid Prime developers). Fast and challenging, ReCore combines arcadey action loops with the loot-and-upgrade systems of newer games to great effect.

The narrative is interesting but somewhat incidental to the gameplay, and sees protagonist Joule wake after centuries of stasis on a desert planet called Far Eden. She's been shuttled there with thousands of others escaping a rapidly declining Earth, and is expecting to find construction of a human colony well underway when she awakes. Instead, she finds no trace of any humans, and all the robots designed to help the colonists have gone haywire.

Along with the dog-shaped friendly robot Mac, she sets out to uncover what went wrong and to mess up some mechanical maniacs in the process.

Joule has a limited and easy-to-grasp set of tools at her disposal, and combining them gives you a thrilling degree of freedom to move around the world. Double jumps and mid-air dashes are a lot of fun to play around with, and precision landings become second nature in no time, making the increasingly convoluted platforming challenges tough but doable.

Dashing and jumping is important in combat too, and while shooting is very straightforward (lock on with one button, hold the trigger to shoot, charge a secondary trigger for a concussive blast) there's the added wrinkle of switching between standard ammo and red, blue or yellow varieties. Colour coding your blasts to match enemies results in more damage, while each bad guy also has set attack patterns that allow you to learn when to dodge, when to switch ammo and when to loose a charge shot. At its best, ReCore tests your ability to combine all the tools at your disposal in long chains of combat and traversal.

And then there's loot. It's everywhere. Most important are cores, which you can rip from enemies via a quick bit of tug-of-war by weakening them and then attaching a grappling hook. Cores allow you to upgrade the stats of Mac and the other cute robotic allies you find.

The other major category of loot are various colour-coded parts you can attach to augment your mechanical friends. Later in the game, having your buddies kitted out to be strong against certain enemies is key, and each one has a special ability to help exploration too.

While the narrative pulls you along, you pass many dungeons and other side activities that offer a chance to earn the best loot. Many of these give you a range of objectives and will only yield their greatest treasure if you complete them all in a single run. These bite-sized, replayable bits of challenge are some of the best parts of ReCore, but they also contribute a great deal to its biggest failing.

Progress in the game is tied to a certain resource called prismatic cores, primarily found in dungeons, side activities and boss enemies. If you complete every dungeon and side quest as you pass it you should have a clear (albeit slow) path all the way through the game. But more likely you'll get to a spot in the final quarter of the game, like I did, and realise you need to trek all over the massive map for hours picking up cores you missed.

You may also find that, unless you grind through the dungeons multiple times to up your abilities, Joule and co are too weak to take on many of the enemy waves in the late game.

By stopping players from progressing until they have a certain number of prismatic cores, ReCore's design slides from exhilarating fun to exhausting chore the further you get after the brilliant first six hours.

This is compounded by a baffling technical flaw: every time you die or warp to a different area you're forced to sit through an extremely long loading screen. Like, minutes long. This is tolerable in the early game, but the amount of warping and dieing you're likely to do later on makes it a massive pain.

On the subject of technical flaws, the Xbox One version of the game is prone to some real iffy frame rates as well, but I found this infinitely less frustrating than the loads.

ReCore is not a full-priced game from a AAA developer, so from a certain point of view having a fun core loop, great challenges and six hours of well-paced content is a great success. Yet it's hard not to be disappointed when seeing Joule's story through to the end becomes a trudge thanks to some poorly implemented design and technical issues.

Recore is out now for Xbox One and Windows 10. Buying one version automatically entitles you to the other as well.