ReCore: Definitive Edition

While looking at ReCore: Definitive Edition at a recent sale, I realized the only reason I wanted it on Steam was to get its stats added up to my profile's achievement showcase. I came to my senses and instead decided to play it were it was cheapest, which still was on the Windows Store with the Xbox Game Pass for PC. Especially since the pass remained 1€ even though it had said 4€ per month after the first. Maybe its counter reset when I canceled my subscription.

A budget Horizon Zero Dawn

I'm happy with my decision of not actually buying Recore. I had gotten a strong first impression of it but it didn't turn out to be really worth owning in the end. Like one user review on Steam said that you will like the game but won't finish it. I did it finish it, through and through, but I do see what they were saying.

Initially I thought that Recore ran rather well for a Unity engine game. All manner of minor problems did eventually start showing up however. There were few random hitches, distant textures disappearing, and being unable to perform an action if I had died while doing it. But the worst were the long loading times -- a common thing in Unity titles. They weren't the worst ever but long enough to make jumping in and out of an area undesirable.

Recore lacks depth in its story and its combat has flaws. The overworld is kind of samey too, only featuring rocky and sandy desert without a day/night cycle. Recore's best feature is its movement which is largely the reason why I took an immediate liking to the game. I found the soundtrack to be fairly nice as well.

You play as Joule Adams, one of the first people on Far Eden. The planet is being terraformed into humanity's new home after Earth's been ravaged by some deadly virus. Robots that were supposedly do majority of the work have gone rogue however and you need to figure out what's going on. Basically you just destroy hundreds of robots and that's it for the story.

Recore may look like a shooter, Joule having an energy rifle and all, but I wouldn't necessarily call it such. You point at an enemy, hold down the lock button and all your shots will land as long as the target robot is not jumping. There's no skill involved in hitting stuff.

You also have a charged blast that does have more of a travel time but you only need it for stationary stuff. The definitive edition adds a penetrating, lobbed, and multitarget shots. They are however unlocked at a high level area (that has nighttime for a change) you're not likely to visit until late game. And even then I don't think the new special shots are that much more useful than the default one.

A game of robots

Joule doesn't get any customization options, which is a shame -- I would've liked outfit changes; something to cover her shoulders that are cooking in the sun. Her corebot friends get more upgrades although it's a mostly linear upgrade system as I don't think the stat differences matter that much between parts of the same level. Each bot frame has four parts you can upgrades. More parts you get from researching blueprints you've found.

Joule gets three companion cores: Mack, Seth, and Duncan. They start as a dog, spider, and ape bots respectively but you can switch their frames around. I think that takes away the personality the cores had; their names become merely synonyms for their colors. There is also a flyer and a tank bot frame.

A bot gets a different special ability depending on which color core it has. My favorite was probably Mack in the spider frame with its laser sweep because it tends to hit many enemies at once and do quite a bit of damage as well. In the flyer frame Mack is also pretty effective, having a single target, high-damage laser attack.

Enemy corebots work identically, having the same abilities your bots get. Blue spiders and flyers are dangerous as enemies too, particularly in the Shifting Sands map where their blue laser attacks are virtually invisible against the blindingly white sand. Another dangerous enemy are red flyers whose flame rings felt almost overpowered. They're hard to avoid and do a stupid amount of damage.

Combat would've needed more defensive maneuvers

Recore's combat is reasonably entertaining due to its fast pace. The problem is that almost every time you are hit, the combat tends to become awkward. Blue attacks have a chance to stun and to get rid of status effect, you need to smash movement keys (or waggle analog stick). Yellow attacks destabilize (slow and more damage taken?), requiring jump button smashing. And finally red attacks have a chance to set you on fire. To extinguish the flames, you need to dash. The dash needs to be held for the maximum distance too for otherwise the damage will keep ticking.

Joule doesn't react properly to melee attacks. Her being staggered from melee attacks isn't animated and it's hard to tell when you're able to act again. You don't have many tools to get an enemy off your face either. Dashing alone works very poorly. Hotswapping your corebot while targeting the enemy is more reliable. Hotswapping is also something you should take a habit of doing the moment it becomes available as I learned way too late into the game. It usually adds to your combo and getting your combo to 20 enables an instant core extract which destroys a bot.

You can normally extract a core (with a tug-of-war minigame) when a bot is at low health. Cores give you fusion energy that is used in researching blueprints and most importantly upgrading your core companions' stats. Destroying a bot the old fashion way also destroys its core but instead you get crafting materials. You need both but the number of different parts makes specific materials definitely harder to get while a core can be found in every bot.

I wish you could hotswap all your bots or swap cores without going to the too sparse swapping stations. Each of your bots has a use outside combat: dog can dig up treasures, spider takes you along rails, ape smashes obstacles, flier carries you over chasms, and the tank can be mounted to travel on quicksand and faster in general. While exploring some areas, like the already mentioned Shifting Sands that is a vast map, I often wanted to have more than two of the bots at my disposal at once.

A gathering of collectibles

I've read that the initial release of Recore was criticized (among other things) for locking story progression with prismatic cores. A door won't open unless you have an arbitrary amount of them. I guess people didn't like playing the game but still wanted to beat it or something. And so they lowered the required core amounts. As I was doing a 100% run, the whole thing didn't matter to me but I still found the system odd. It would made more sense if instead of checking your cores, it required you to spend them.

Cores are hidden in all kinds of places and finding them all takes serious effort even with the game telling how many are in each area. Information regarding the game on the internet is often dated as it was written or recorded for the initial release; the definitive edition changed quite a bit. Shifting Sands (again) was perplexing as I got to 12/16 cores after going through the whole map a couple of times, having the dog bot search every dig spot. Then I finally found out that in the current edition of the game the area changes after you've beaten the story.

Indeed, after you've ended the final boss, a sandstorm will hit Shifting Sands when you spend time in there. And in the sandstorm, four prismatic corebots will spawn to give you the final cores. However, there's more. After the sandstorm has arrived and you travel out of the area and then return, the sands have shifted. Some places are blocked off and new ones revealed.

My prismatic core total in the area went to something like 7/15. I guess seven of the cores can be found in both versions of the map. The second map doesn't have dig spots which was nice. Also two of the cores are again found during a sandstorm. All in all I found 111 prismatic cores in the definitive edition which I believe is everything. For achievements just 80 will do though.

Content rich

Recore has numerous optional dungeons. Combat dungeons usually feature a single big room where you fight spawning corebots while traversal dungeons feature challenging platforming. I think the latter are the game's best content. Adventure dungeons are a mix of both.

Movement controls are tight (as long as you don't bonk into an obstacle) and Joule can cover a long distance while in the air. She can double jump and dash. Dashing off a ledge still allows to perform another dash before touching ground. I don't think the game was properly tested for Joule's great movement because I was multiple time able to get to a place I wasn't intended to get yet using some creative dash-jumping. It was fine though as I didn't break anything.

If you haven't mastered the movement in the optional dungeons, the final bits of the game may provide an unpleasant surprise. To get to the end, you need to complete a 5-level adventure dungeon whose traversal challenges are of the more difficult kind. There is no time limit though which makes it more manageable. The optional dungeons on the other hand...

Each of them has three bonus objectives: activate 8 keys, find a yellow orb, and complete the dungeon within a given time limit. Each objective unlocks a different reward. Separately none of the objectives is too bad but together -- in order to unlock a fourth reward -- they become more of a challenge. Usually it's not worth it to try to go for everything on your first attempt but it's possible with the combat dungeons in particular. Armory Flux, a traversal dungeon, was probably the hardest one for me. Even with a flawless run at my speed, I would've had about 15 seconds to spare. On my successful run I fell twice (which puts you back on the last solid platform) and I had only 1 second on the clock remaining.