I stand alone in this room surrounded by enemies of different colors. They’re strong but they don’t know I can count on the help of my robotic friends. With them, I always feel safe, there’s always a backup plan, always another shot at survival. It’s a brutal world I live in but I understand the patterns of my enemies and I know how I can take them out without breaking a sweat. I didn’t take me that long to figure this out, the enemies seem to lack any form of imagination, even if they are constantly trying to kill me.
Don’t judge a game by its trailer
Before I go into details about my hands-on session with Recore, I would like to point out that you should never judge a game by its initial trailer. I remember the revealment of Recore like the day of yesterday and it got me all excited. The game looked amazing and the robot mechanism seemed like an interesting thing that could really change the flow of the game. The moment I played the Gamescom demo however, a lot of this excitement disappeared. I wasn’t allowed to record the game for preview purpose and I think I understand why; Recore doesn’t look good.
Unlike the trailer, the environments and characters didn’t look as sharp as they should and the environments felt a little too empty and unfinished. It’s nothing special really and if you know that the game is releasing next month already, it’s something that gets me worried. But graphics aren’t everything, so what about the gameplay?
Old fashioned gameplay with a twist
The first thing we needed to do in the game was activating some switches to enter our first room filled with enemies. Needless to say, the goal is to shoot those enemies until you’re the last one standing. Shooting and jumping around feels very intuitive and works extremely fluently. The main gimmick of combat is that you should match your ammo with the color of your enemy. For example: if you face a blue enemy, you’ll need to activate your blue ammo using the D-pad on your controller. There’s blue, yellow, red and gray ammo and of course, enemies of those colors. Why you need to do this is unclear since we haven’t seen anything of the actual story yet.Without a real reason to change your ammo, it felt like a needless mechanic to make things unnecessary complicated. In the demo, combat formed the biggest part of the level so we experimented a lot with our different types of ammo.
Aside from the different colors, the robot friend was the biggest help during the combat. In the demo there were two assist robots, one was your new best friends, Mack the robot dog. Mack comes in very handy if you’re looking for something in your environment. With the push of the Y-button, you can call in Mack to help you fight off the enemies. Aside from Mack, we could also summon Seth, a transportation robot that looked like a metallic spider that was able to carry Joule (the hero) across certain platforms. Seth is mostly used for puzzle-solving. Of course, the final product will feature a lot more robots and we can’t wait to see how they will be used in the final game.
Puzzles and collectibles
So is combat the only gameplay element in Recore? No, there’s also room for environmental puzzles but for me personally, it wasn’t always clear what was expected of me. Without visual hints on how to advance in a level, it happened more than once that I was shooting and jumping everywhere on the map, trying to figure out what exactly was expected of the player. So the puzzles got definitely use some tweaking!
The good thing about Recore are the collectibles, just like the old days, the world is filled with stuff to collect. We don’t know why we need to collect everything but the developers told me it’s of importance for the development of the story. If you’re into traditional 3D platforming/collecting games such as Banjo Kazooie, you’ll like this part of Recore most.
Early conclusion:
Recore still feels unfinished, which rather concerns me knowing the game releases next month. It’s not a bad experience but it’s not the innovation I was hoping for. Sure, the shooting and platforming are ok but I never got the feeling of doing something new or innovating. I don’t get why the colors of the ammo and enemies are that big of a deal but perhaps the story could explain the importance. I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt but I’m preparing for the worst.
