ReCore: Definitive Edition (Xbox One)
The patient gamer prospers when it comes to a game like ReCore, a title released that was in dire need of some improvements it wouldn’t find until the Definitive Edition came along and retooled some of the core mechanics. The enhanced version of the game made traversing the large open world easier with better fast travel options, combat and equipment balancing was improved, loading times were lessened, and the language the game’s mostly robot cast speaks is now subtitled to be properly understood. For people who waited to pick up ReCore, the Definitive Edition certainly offers a better experience than the initial release, but this version of the game still didn’t fix some of the problems at the heart of the title’s most important systems.
Perhaps the system with the most flaws in ReCore: Definitive Edition would have to be one of its most important components: the combat. This third-person shooter gives you one weapon to use throughout, a rifle with that fires in a similar manner to a machine gun. Combat at its simplest boils down to you locking onto an enemy and holding down the fire button to load them full of bullets, but your gun will overheat if you fire it for too long, leading to a short downtime where it needs to cool off. You are also told that your gun’s accuracy will diminish the longer you hold down the trigger, but save for the smallest of enemies this doesn’t have too much of an impact on its efficiency. No matter what you’re fighting in the game though, your approach to the battle will be pretty much the same. You lock onto the enemy, dodge and jump around to avoid their attacks, and hold down the trigger to fire at them while doing so. When an enemy is at a low enough health though, you can try and extract their core through a process that feels sort of similar to reeling in a fish. You launch a line at your enemy’s core, the player then needing to pull it in by reeling it in at the right moments to remove the core without snapping the line. This can wrap up battles more quickly, but it is slow and can be interrupted by other enemies, meaning that it’s not always the best option and gets old if done too many times in quick succession. You can build up your combo meter to do an instant version though that will kill the enemy quickly and without the reeling in part, the combo system basically just being about landing enough shots without being hit yourself so there really isn’t much to that system either despite it having a pretty good reward for engaging with it.
While many games will feature extra weapons that force you to change up your fighting style, such as a shotgun that requires you to be close to deal heavy damage, ReCore sticks you with the single rifle throughout. It does have some alternate firing modes, but these don’t really change your tactics in any meaningful way. Your gun has a charge shot that deals a quick burst of damage if it hits, its main purpose being to inflict the special effects of your gun’s three colored ammo types. Over the course of your journey, you’ll unlock yellow, red, and blue ammo for the gun, these feeling identical save for small things like the charge shot burning or shocking an enemy depending on which color your using. These effects aren’t drastic enough to warrant switching ammo types though, but you will be changing your gun’s color a lot since the color of your enemy indicates their weakness. A red enemy is weak to red shots, so you switch to red ammo and that’s the whole experience of swapping your color. The fight doesn’t change in any way because of the color, but some enemies will shift colors when fought or will be a color like green or purple that requires you to know which primary colors make up that secondary color. Even if you didn’t though, swapping color is so fast you could quickly figure out which to use without much thought. There are optional weapon upgrades squirreled away in areas added to the Definitive Edition, but these alternate firing types don’t shift the gameplay around much since enemies weren’t designed with these additions in mind. The game does eventually throw in some enemies that have to be shot from certain angles or have no clear color weakness to engage the original weapon settings, but these mostly just become long fights or annoying ones, with the flying enemy whose weakness is in its back being of particular note. This particular robot will fly with its back away from you and appear in arenas where you can’t easily dodge behind it and fire, meaning this opportunity to make an interesting fight is hampered by the fight design nervously trying to protect an enemy that broke away from the normal formula too much.
Everything you fight in ReCore: Definitive Edition is a type of robot known as a corebot, these machines often styled around real world animals like wolves or spiders but made large enough to put up a fight against the game’s main character Joule. Some smaller robots break away from that design ethos as they exist for support purposes, such as the little flying ones that will heal up your enemies who already take too long to kill. The smallest bit of strategy does come from this design choice in that you should sometimes target them instead to take them out first, although shifting your lock-on can sometimes be imprecise, especially when dodging. Your most active participation in the fight involves jumping around and dodging to avoid incoming attacks, but sometimes the lock-on can disconnect during these maneuvers and you’ll suddenly be dodging off in an unintended direction. There is one last thing you do have on your side though, and that’s the company of your own robot. Joule is joined in combat by friendly machines, her options expanding over the course of the game on who she wants to take with her. You can have two in the field but only one out at a time, but you can swap them out during a battle and tell them to use their “Lethal” attacks. Enemies and your robots have these so-called lethal strikes that are basically just strong attacks with more pronounced tells than their regular options so that you have the time to avoid them. Your robot’s participation in the fight will often be distracting the enemy robots as your partner is completely controlled by the game’s AI, your only orders being to swap them out or have them execute their strong attack. It is another attack option that makes the combat a bit better than its otherwise basic design, but it can’t make up for the fact this long experience relies so much on a fighting system that is too straightforward and repetitive. It doesn’t help that sometimes there are tiny enemy robots that can abduct your corebot for a bit, and other times the corebot might just not update to your position properly, leaving you alone in battle and with even less battle options until things can be sorted out.
Keep this weak combat system in mind as we move on, as it ends up poisoning some otherwise decent elements that the game got right. For example, ReCore’s world concept is an interesting one. Joule awakens far off in the futre on an alien world called Far Eden, but while this place was meant to be a thriving colony for humans after Earth was ravaged by the oddly named Dust Devil Plague, she finds it a desert littered with broken colonization machines and overrun with rogue versions of the robots that were meant to help humanity adjust to this new planet. Joule herself has a partner robot, a dog-like machine named Mack, and on her journey she will meet other corebots who can join her on her journey and have special uses in the world like a spider that will let her climb walls or a gorilla that can smash through rubble to make new paths. Joule sets off into this failed Far Eden to discover what went wrong and hopefully find any other humans who survived this failed effort to keep the human race alive, and along the journey there will be moments and hidden audio logs that help to flesh out the history of why Far Eden was made and how it became what we find it as today. The remains of the technology help to make the desert world still have areas that stand out and are interesting to explore, although without fast travel they would be rather empty and the deserts fairly wide, making traversing them before you find a fast travel point a bit slow.
Along the course of your adventure you can level up and find new equipment for your friendly corebots, and while these do make you and your partners stronger, it still doesn’t shake up the fighting much, making the rewards a little less exciting to receive. Despite being an open world game where you’re free to go where you like, most of the action takes place in dungeons. While many of these will involve fighting corebots as well as a few packing boss battles, the game also mixes in some pretty decent platforming here, Joule’s jumps and dodges allowing for some challenging layouts. There are some interesting ideas on offer here, such as floating rings in the air that can refresh her aerial movement options so you’ll have to plan the timing of your movements to cross large gaps between platforms, these rings allowing for some pretty tight windows for success. Areas with dangerous ceilings moving up and down will force you to dip below platforms and jump up onto them when its safe, and other obstacles likes lasers and deadly rolling objects will require you to develop some movement skills that can then be used to reach areas of the overworld with hidden goodies. It’s a satisfying design that rewards mastering it, but it isn’t featured enoguh to make up for the more prevalent battle system. The platforming sees some of its greatest challenges in the optional dungeons though, although I hesitate to call them truly optional.
The game features collectibles called Prismatic Cores that are necessary to open new story dungeons, but if you just stick on the story path, you will not get enough of these to complete it. Even when deviating from the main path when something interesting appears on the map or on the horizon like I did, I didn’t have enough cores for some of the final dungeons, meaning I had to go search the world for more Prismatic Cores. Some are hidden in the desert behind small combat or exploration challenges while others crop up in the more uniquely designed dungeons, but some of these dungeons hinge on combat and thus face the same issues as story missions that rely on them, that being they grow dull very quickly. Optional missions for extra rewards in these dungeons can help spice things up, takes like shooting hidden switches or completing them in a limited time requiring different approaches to combat, but the rewards for doing them aren’t consistent, meaning you might have to run the same dungeon multiple times to pursue the different missions and get the more useful rewards like the Prismatic Cores. You still don’t have to do all the optional content to beat the game’s main story so you can try and engage with the better designed dungeons and overworld challenges, but it can still interrupt the game’s momentum when you have to go and scour the world for more Cores so close to the climax.
THE VERDICT: The core of most of ReCore: Definitive Edition’s problems has to be the underwhelming combat design. Changing your gun’s colors is a poor attempt at variety that doesn’t make up for the fact you’ll mostly be shooting the same things in long battles without any interesting changes to the battle format, and while your robot allies are fun to have along, they don’t add much to battles either. The world of Far Eden has some interesting history and design choices, and the platforming its overworld and dungeons encourage can make for challenges that value timing and thought. Unfortunately, the bulk of the experience hinges on the repetitive combat, and since the story will put the brakes on progress to make you explore the world and more often engage with those battles than anything else, ReCore: Definitive Edition ends up a game with a poor flow where its good moments are interruptions to the tedium of bad combat.
And so, I give ReCore: Definitive Edition for Xbox One…
A BAD rating. Bafflingly, there are three weapon types in ReCore: Definitive Edition that do change how you can fight, but these are late game acquisitions in an optional area that still can’t shake up the core combat despite that being the perfect opportunity to inject new life into the title during its tune up. ReCore: Definitive Edition needed more fundamental changes to its construction that probably couldn’t be done easily, and while it did manage to clean up some elements that weighed down the experience, the constant attention fighting is given means it needed much more than different colored ammo and some late game options you might not even have much time to use. The platforming has what it needs to be an enjoyable experience and there’s potential in the world’s concept for something compelling, but there are far too many battles compared to those brief moments of interesting lore and the well-designed movement challenges. Luckily, the battle system tends to be more dull than excruciating, but tiny things like the messed up lock-on system and forced deviations to complete what seemed like optional objectives ruin ReCore in ways other than just giving you way too much mindless combat.
It does seem possible that a ReCore 2 could redeem the game if it ever came to be. Many of the changes made in ReCore’s Definitive Edition seem to acknowledge its faults and try to make up for them without restructuring the entire experience, but if built from the ground up, the late game optional weapon upgrades could instead be front and center, other small niggling points easy enough to improve on a second go as well. Whether such a game will be made is unclear, so instead we’re left with a better version of a flawed title. ReCore: Definitive Edition can’t escape its repetitive design even with its enhancements, but it was much closer to being passable than its older, much rougher form.