ReCore: Definitive Edition

When Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune and development talent from the Metroid Prime series get together, you can expect plenty of platforming, exploration, and robot animals. Unfortunately, any hope of ReCore being the ultimate Mega Man/Metroid hybrid proves as farfetched as Joule’s mechanical companions. While ReCore’s gameplay foundation is mostly solid, a host of technical and design issues stand ready to hinder your progress and enjoyment.

I was pleasantly surprised by ReCore’s opening hours, mostly thanks to the intriguing sci-fi premise. You play as Joule, a colonial engineer who has awakened from cryo-sleep to find and fix whatever has stopped the terraforming process on Far Eden. Aided by your robot dog, you begin exploring the large desert world, sampling its myriad dungeons and fast-paced action, while collecting more mechanical companions along the way.

Once ReCore starts ramping up, however, the experience starts to unravel. Aggressive auto-targeting makes aiming during combat a non-issue. Instead, Comcept injects excitement into battles by making enemies so powerful that a few consecutive hits will kill you; you need to use Joule’s double-jump and boost abilities to constantly stay on the move (and preferably off the ground). I’d be fine with the fast-paced and frenetic action if Joule’s stagger animation — which is triggered by most enemy attacks — didn’t leave you completely immobilized. The shameless A.I. is more than happy to capitalize on your vulnerability by whomping you with follow-up attacks, often ending in a frustrating death while you helplessly struggle to regain control.

ReCore’s fickle combat is compounded by positively dreadful load times. Multiple areas take over two minutes to reload, no matter how cheap the death. Platforming sequences are thankfully immune to this problem, but the need to constantly move between zones, dungeons, “fast-travel” points, and Joule’s sand crawler (the only place you can apply upgrades) means you’re waiting almost as much as you’re playing. This kind of egregious interruption is practically unheard of in modern gaming, and unacceptable.

Far Eden also quickly loses its luster. The open world is massive, but shockingly barren. Entire swaths of the map are devoid of anything but white sand and the occasional recycled rock. Outside of the dungeons, you don’t have much to do other than collect crafting items and get into random battles. Some areas of the map are so bland and uneventful that they feel unfinished.

Even ReCore’s adorable companions have their flaws. While each of the four collectible robot frames features a unique ability to aid you in traversal or exploration, you can only have two with you at any time, and must return to a fast-travel location to swap them out. That means all too often when you come across a gated area or secret in the world, you don’t have the proper companion to explore it.

Animal upgrades also stall as better frames require rare crafting items that you can’t get without copious grinding. Even increasing their stats is perplexingly flawed — you have to boost each stat by slowly filling up a meter with your collected orbs, one level at a time, hundreds of times for each companion. ReCore’s biggest annoyance is its constant attempt to pad the length of its campaign by slowing down your progress. Each main story mission sports both a level and a prismatic core requirement. You gain these glowing orbs by completing “optional” side dungeons, but before you can enter most of them, you first must find a handful of collectible cellbots hidden in the world. My progress to the final tower, a five-floor gauntlet of platforming and combat challenges, was stalled for hours as I scoured the world for these dumb floating batteries, all so that I could snag a few more orbs.

Even worse, each floor of the final tower has its own increasing level requirement, yet doesn’t offer enough XP to meet the next one. The result? After each area, I was forced to head back out into the world to grind in repetitive arena battles.

This is a real shame, because otherwise the tower’s devious challenges would have presented a satisfying culmination of your skills and a worthy prelude to the final showdown. Instead, they feel short and disjointed, and the final boss battle ends abruptly.

ReCore is a poster child for wasted potential. At its heart it’s a good (though not great) game, marred by long load times, technical problems (including frame rate dips and the occasional crash), and bad pacing. The infuriating and frivolous road blocks may have doubled the length of the 20-hour game, but they also halved my fun.

Mankind's desire to explore the universe is rooted in our curiosity. But in ReCore – the upcoming Microsoft title co-developed by Keiji Inafune's Comcept and Armature Studios (The Unfinished Swan) – that desire is born out of survival. Something happened to Earth that forces humans to seek out other worlds to terraform. However, not even the promise of new planets can deliver a rebirth. ReCore's protagonist, Joule, wakes up from her cryo sleep to find that something has gone wrong. The hopefully named planet of New Eden, which was supposed to be terraformed and habitable at the start of ReCore, is instead a desert wasteland. Joule arrived as part of a larger team, but she is alone except for her companion robot, Mack. The rest of the robots transported to help with the terraforming process apparently ran amok, turning upon their human creators and becoming hostile. Their deep involvement in the development of New Eden means that significant parts of the planet are mechanized.

The world consists of two basic settings: the desert surface and the varied caverns below. While ReCore is not an open-world title per se, plenty of side areas can be explored for resources and collectibles. Joule wears a light exoskeleton that enables her to double jump and dash in order to navigate the world's platforming challenges. These moves didn't figure prominently into the hands-on time I had with the title, but Inafune (creator of Mega Man) stresses that platforming is a key part of the title. How well this aspect is executed is important to the game's success.

Joule's movements are so important to the title that director Mark Pacini at Armature says they prevent ReCore from using a traditional aiming system for combat. Her weapons have a reticle, but you don't move it independently via the right analog. Instead, ReCore auto locks-on and switches targets based on Joule's movement. "ReCore isn't a game about aiming," he says, "It's a game about timing, movement, and position."

In practice I didn't find Joule's moves as specialized as Pacini suggests, but the targeting system wasn't hard to pick up, either. Occasionally, I did have problems when enemies would attack on different vertical planes and the game would twitch between them momentarily as I moved around, making me wonder which one it would choose to target. Given Pacini's comments about Joule's movements in relation to the targeting, it will be interesting to see if her exoskeleton grants any new abilities (I played a section three hours in) that change up the interplay between the two gameplay systems.

Combat is based around different colors, requiring Joule to equip the correct weapon with the d-pad to match the color attacks of her enemies. Opponents with prismatic cores, therefore, require the player to switch weapons in order to blast through the enemy's various forms. The iron fang bot, for example, uses a red dash attack to create a blazing fire trail while also sweeping a blue beam across the screen. You can deal damage with any color or weapon you like, but you won't be nearly as effective.

Joule not only has her multi-colored weapons to fight off the revolting robots, but her trusty core bot helper. Mack can dig up resource cores buried in the environment and perform a blue, lethal attack by pressing the Y button. Other core bots can be used for different purposes (and colors) such as climbing on walls as the game goes on, but clearly Joule and Mack have their own connection when the game begins.

Both Joule and her core bots upgrade as the game progresses, but the developers aren't divulging a lot of details about this just yet. Found resources will factor in, and players must make tough decisions with some enemies: Do you pull their power core out early or defeat them entirely? The former grants a handy resource, but if you do the latter you get loot.

Joule, Mack, and the rest of her core bots have a long journey ahead of them as they try to stabilize the planet and discover what exactly went wrong with the terraforming process. It remains to be seen how engaging the game's platforming is and how it meshes with players' exploration of the world, and how quickly they take to its non-traditional combat targeting.