ReCore, is a 3rd person action adventure shooter for Xbox and Windows 10 platforms from Comcept and Armature Studio and produced by Keiji Inafune

When Earth was being destroyed by a highly infectious disease called Dust Devil, a global effort to save mankind was initiated. Thousands of “Corebots” were sent ahead of everyone else to set up machines and structures so that when the rest of the colonists arrived, the planet would be perfect for our new home. After waking from a long cryosleep our protagonist, Joule wakes to find that things had not exactly gone according to plan. With the help of her trusty CoreBot Mack, Joule has to set out to discover what went wrong.

The gameplay is exactly what you would expect from a platform title. The premise is simple. Go from point a to point b by jumping, double jumping and dashing. Step on pressure sensors, kill the bots, obtain the core rinse and repeat. For the first while, that’s about all you do – it’s when you get Seth that things begin to shape up a little differently with the ability to crawl up specific walls. Combat is smooth and simple. Perhaps… too simple? At any rate – ReCore features lock on combat to the nth degree. Hold the RB button to build a charged shot to deal extra damage and break their shield. Press and hold the left trigger and the targeting snaps to the nearest enemy, hold down the right trigger to unleash a fury of bullets which recharge on their own, press the Y button to order your friendly bot to attack. That’s it. It’s literally as simple as that but to me it felt good.

On your adventure, Joule will encounter a small variety of bots to dispatch with her gun and bot friends. Each enemy is color coded and Joule will have to switch between the various colors (as she unlocks them) with the D-Pad to better take the crazed bots down. When the bots have been weakened enough, you can press down on the right stick and pulling down on the stick with the right amount of tension in an effort to yank the orb out of the bad guy.

Color coded orbs and shards of orbs are collected and used to level up the various bots when in Joule’s Crawler (the vehicle she calls home). The 3 attributes are Energy, Defense and Attack. Further more ReCore has a very simplistic crafting system which is used to research blueprints for new parts to outfit the bots with. You can combine items to make them better or split them to take them down to a lesser level all in an effort to help your bots become more powerful and help you to take down the bad guys.

Scattered throughout Far Eden are trial dungeons. They’re timed challenges having you run, jump dash etc from platform to platform and shooting color coded switches all in an effort to earn some extra special treasures. They’re a nice distraction and quite difficult to get through in the allotted time but it can be done. It just may take you a whole bunch of tries to get it right.

The graphics are decent, vibrant and appealing to the eye, they’re hardly at the same level one would expect from this current crop of gaming platforms.  The game suffers from frame rate drops, texture pop in and features some incredibly low resolution textures in the environments. It’s not the end of the world but I do hope they can fix these technical issues. The loading times. OH HOW I LOATHE THE! At the point in time, the loading times between levels

As a whole package – I’m not at all disappointed with ReCore despite some of the technical issues currently experienced. The game is fun, fast paced, and I was engaged in the story but after you finish the game once, chances are you won’t go back to it for some time(if ever) unless you really want to conquer those challenge dungeons. Despite some of the stumbles, ReCore is a breath of fresh air and I suspect that Joule is could be a new face synonymous with the XBox brand.

Pixel Cereal gives ReCore 8 out of 10

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