ReCore

Maybe more than any other game, though perhaps it's a good thing I didn't.

Recore came out in 2016, but it may as well not existed until late 2018. It performs terribly on Xbox, even the One X experiences crashes. It launched with less content and missing features (which have since been added into the Definitive Edition). For the first two years, the PC version was only available by way of jumping through the hoops of the Windows store.

I will say, flat out, I can only recommend playing this game on PC, through Steam, using a controller. You should not play this on Xbox, you should not buy this through the Windows store, and while M+KB is playable it isn't ideal.

Because of the game's reputation, I felt compelled to check out reviews of Recore, to find out why people didn't like it even after the Definitive Edition on Steam addressed a lot of problems I had heard of in the past. Part of the answer is, for critics at least, the Definitive Edition was too little too late, and the game's reputation was set in stone. The Definitive Edition doesn't even have a Metacritic score.

As for analyses by average users and amateur games journalists (fancy talk for "youtubers") I'm surprised by two things:

1: People compare Recore to other games a lot, which is not a problem on its own, but...

2: I've seen almost nobody Recore to the previous games from its leading creatives.

Recore is probably the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Keiji Inafune and Armature's prototype for a Mega Man X/Maverick Hunter first person shooter. After Inafune left Capcom, they probably still wanted to work together, but needed to find a way to actually get the money. Recore being a Microsoft Studios game was probably the only way that it was going to happen, but I feel like in a lot of ways this held the game back. I'll get back to this later, but what I'm trying to address right now is that, well...

I don't mean this in a condescending way, because it's mostly the fault of how the game was marketed and who it was available to during its launch window, but I honestly kind of think that the average Xbox fan probably lacks the "gaming vocabulary" to even parse what this game is. This game has a lot going on, it's a third person, action adventure, looter shooter, character action, open world, collectathon platformer, and that probably doesn't even cover everything. If someone doesn't even have the baseline "oh its third person Metroid Prime with a Mega Man X air-dash" the first time they boot up the game, they are going to be completely lost. A lot of the negativity surrounding the game is rooted in not even realizing that it's a collectathon until the very end, but I digress.

This is very much a game made by the people who made Metroid Prime. I swear, some of the UI and Menu sound effects are just straight up ripped from that game. Playing this right after finishing Metroid Prime was very natural, for a number of reasons.

My main problem with Metroid Prime was the combat encounters toward the end, which relied mostly on multiplying enemies that could only be defeated by color-coded weapons. Recore's entire combat system is built around this same color-matching mechanic, but there are a number of ways that they make it work for the length of an entire game. They also have streamlined things in a number of ways: switching beam colors no longer requires waiting through an animation, it's instant. Using the wrong color of beam won't completely negate damage, only result in weaker attacks.

In Metroid Prime, rapid fire, charged attacks, jumping, and dodging were all done with only 2 buttons, the resulting action being context dependent on whether A was being tapped or held, and on whether the control stick was being tilted. Here, all four actions have their own separate button. One of the most frustrating things about fighting the multi-colored fission metroids (and, to a lesser extent, the game's combat in general) was changing lock-on targets; in Recore, you just point the right stick in the direction of the enemy you want to switch to.

This is very much a game from Keiji Inafune. The technology of the game's setting, especially things like the E-Tower and Pylon 512 definitely evoke the same kind of feeling as Model W or any number of structures and machines from the Inti Creates Mega Man games. The game's platforming and movement are based primarily on dashes and air-dashes. Honestly, one of my biggest complaints about the game is that when you jump out of a dash you don't keep your momentum, something characteristic of Mega Man dashing physics as far back as the SNES. Dashing is even on the rightmost face button, just like in Mega Man X on SNES. The main character is named Joule, a name she shares with a major supporting character from Inti Creates' 2014 game Azure Striker Gunvolt.

Some people complain that the story of this game is too serious, too existentially threatening for a game featuring a girl and her robot dog fighting an evil Bionicle, but this is Keiji Inafune. Mega Man Zero 2 is the only video game I am aware of that is (well, was, I think they raised it for the Legacy Collection) rated E for Everyone, and also contains the phrase "concentration camps". This is expected from the kinds of settings Comcept conceptualizes.

If an enemy is low on health, they can be killed with a deathblow mini-game that will yield both a special kind of XP for your robot buddies, and a health refill. If you can kill small enemies or deplete segments of larger enemies fast enough, you can rack up a combo. If you have a combo of 10 or higher, you can expend 10 combo points to deathblow the enemy instantly, bypassing the mini-game. The final dungeon of the game has some really interesting uses of these mechanics: there are areas where you will constantly lose health, but there will either be small bug enemies that you can use to make your combo meter skyrocket, or landmine enemies that can be instantly deathblowed at any time.

Some players don't like that the final area of the game requires them to use the mechanics of the game in such advanced ways, but most people who play this game seemingly can't even get the basics down. From the beginning of the game, the player can use their robot dog to dig for items; the main story even requires it at multiple points. The achievement for digging 20 times is more rare than the achievement for entering the final level. The achievement for gliding for 20 seconds, something which will definitely happen if a player glides in the overworld at all, is more rare than the achievement for finishing the main story.

This final area, the E-Tower, is important to the story because its part of a terraforming system. Once you start progressing through the tower, a previously visited area of the game, Shifting Sands, now has a dynamic weather system because of the E-Tower's antics. Storms will periodically occur and (as the name of the area implies) shift the sand around, making new areas accessible. Only about 1 in 5 players who enters the final level finds this content at all.

Anyway, I feel like this is becoming a ramble, even by my standards, so let me try to boil it down.

What do I like about this game?

I like the exploration, I like using the different robots to traverse new areas, to find new dungeons. It's similar to finding shrines in Breath of the Wild, the FL1R and T8NK robots are even comparable to the sail-cloth and motorcycle from that game. Climbing up rock formations gathering crafting materials reminds me a lot of gathering items in a game like Xenoblade X, but without the demoralizing intimidation of that game's sheer scale.

I wish I had realized sooner that the map icons show you what kind of dungeon each one is, because I would have tackled more of the Traversal Dungeons (the platforming focused ones) sooner if I had known how to distinguish them (they're the ones with the triangular hazard icon). This is no Bowser's Fury by any stretch but the platforming is really fun and fluid. It's especially fun with the spider robot, grappling onto a rail, clanking around on it, air-dashing to reach the next one.

The combat takes a little while to really get going, but once you get used to it, and especially once you get the different firing modes in the DLC area, it's a really engaging loop. Some of the encounters are a little tough, but there isn't really anything that gets ridiculous, outside of maybe the final boss. It's a really busy encounter, but I still got through it on my first try.

I really like the setting, it reminds me of the Lego Mindstorms Stormrunner flash game. A desert planet, industrial robots, it's just neat.

What don't I like?

The presentation in general is a bit off, but the soundtrack is the most glaring. There may as well only be two types of song in the game. The first is droning orchestral swells, boring film score type tracks to let you know the things that are happening are very important and dramatic. The second is rhythmic bass heavy tracks, sometimes in an unusual time signature, to let you know that things are tense. Mega Man and Metroid are both known for their incredible soundtracks; I played Recore for almost 20 hours these past few weeks and don't remember a single melody, though I will admit that around the 15 hour mark I started playing with a podcast in the background, because the game audio just wasn't that important to my experience. The soundtrack was composed by a guy who mostly has worked on the sound of FPS games and movie tie-ins. I don't mean to say that this music is bad, or even that this was the result of his individual creative choice, but I do think that this music was a poor fit for this game, and I have a hard time imagining that it was anything other than a Microsoft decision.

And as much as I love the setting, I do wish there was more variety. If there was a sequel I'd hope that it would be set either on a different planet, or after enough terraforming has happened to give Far Eden some different climates, biomes, etc. But of course, a sequel to this game will probably not happen, and if it did, it probably wouldn't be made by Armature and Comcept.

In conclusion:

Recore is the best thing Keiji Inafune has been attached to since leaving Capcom, and I hope that's not in spite of his involvement.

Recore is basically the only real video game Armature has even made (everything else is ports, VR shit, and a now defunct online shooter), and that's a shame, I'd love to see more.

Recore is probably the best Microsoft Studios game that isn't a 2D platformer.

Recore is not in my top ten games of the past decade, but if I listed my top fifty, it might be somewhere in the thirties or so.

Recore isn't great, at one point it probably wasn't even good, but it is now. I'd say give it a chance. I went in out of morbid curiosity, I expected to hate it, but if you can play it on its own terms its genuinely a great time.

This review was originally written last year before I played the Xbox Series X version of the game, which I can say is as good as the Steam version of the game. I have no idea whether the Xbox One X version still has issues, or if the Series S version is any good.