After the failure of Mighty No. 9, Keiji Inafune’s reputation was on unstable ground. Can this latest release from Comcept redeem him in the gaming world?
As I started ReCore up and was thrust into the desert landscape of Far Eden, I instantly noticed that the controls handled excellently; the jump and double-jump felt instantaneous and when added in with the boost, it gave me a 360-degree area of effect. I’m always excited when a game kicks off straight away and hands me a character that handles perfectly – it doesn’t happen often 
but ReCore started as one of those games. The grand scale of the game was vast, showing an ever expanding world full of mountains and canyons with sandstorms changing the locales, all-the-while manmade structures strut out from under the desert, leading you to places that can be explored for treasure and adventure.
The combat is fast and frenetic, using your rifle to blast away at everything whilst your robot companion fights at your side. The rifle gains coloured charges as you progress, which can be coordinated with the Mechs you fight for extra damage, creating another level of thought as you try to shoot and dodge whilst changing your rifle’s charge. As you progress, you also gain new Mechs to help you get to new areas and destroy any enemy that tries to get too close to you. Some of these Mechs vastly change where you can go and how the game can be played, but unfortunately you can only take two of the four Mechs out with you at any one time. The good news is that there’s also a fifth Mech which will be made available soon.
ReCore also adds a pretty in-depth crafting system, where the bits and pieces you pick up along the way can be used to upgrade your Mechs which affect both the aesthetics and the stats of individual aspects. There are also blueprints available which give you the key to upgrading and help you distinguish which bits and pieces you need to go out and find.
Finally, we get to the cores themselves; the main power of the game and the driving point behind the narrative. As you fight you can harpoon enemies, tear out their power source and use it to upgrade stats of your own Mechs cores. As well as this, there are prismatic cores which are the specific cores you use to gain access to dungeons and to continue on with the story of the game. This is where the game starts to crumble; early on it isn’t a massive issue, but as you progress, the backtracking needed to collect the huge amount of prismatic cores becomes a lesson in tedium that I didn’t sign up for.
The backtracking for me is when ReCore started to show its true colours and the game that I had been engulfed in for great controls became an annoying, bland, repetitive mess. This is mainly due to the fact that no matter how many times you come in or out of a certain location, if you go back to that location you have to watch an almost two-minute loading screen, to go through a door to a location you just came from two minutes ago! Two minutes to go from one bland looking desert to another bland looking desert, to kill the same robots and do the same junk. Don’t get me wrong these are the things I initially enjoyed but having the same thing over and over again isn’t a recipe for enjoyment, but a recipe for some sort of boring game quiche.
For me, ReCore is a game that started off great, but gradually lost that initial sheen and became just another mediocre game.
Author: Hal, Plymouth store
