This brings me to one of ReCore’s biggest game mechanics: Cores and Corebots. Cores are those glowing spheres that you’ve seen in all of the promotional material powering your Corebot companions. Cores aren’t only powering your robot buddies, but all of the enemies on Far Eden, too. This is where ReCore’s upgrade system comes into play. Joule has the ability at times during combat to rip these cores straight out of her enemies, leaving them in pieces on the floor, and providing her with the fuel to further power up robot dog Mack, spider bot Seth, and the lumbering titan, Duncan.

Extracting these cores proved to not only feel oddly satisfying, but was also an interesting mini-game in itself. Players are required to click down the right stick to engage your grappling hook of sorts and point it down to slowly pry the core out of the metal frame. Pull too hard at the wrong time and the wire will turn red, signaling it’s getting too tense. Flashing white means the whole thing is about to break. This makes extracting cores far more than just holding down until it finally comes to you. Instead, you’ll have to ease off the tension, but not too much that you suffer damage from the resisting robot. When you’ve finally ripped the core from the robot body, you’ll feel like a badass. Especially when you get the chance to perform an ‘instant extraction’ which, when executed, is swift and very rarely unsuccessful.

The cores you harvest from enemies can be used to quickly bolster your Corebots’ stats. The cores are turned into fusion energy, which Joule can then use at her Crawler’s (her ship) workbench to bolster the Attack, Defense, and Energy stats with Core Fusion. Simply put, the cores found are broken down into smaller units of fusion energy which then contribute to leveling up the stats of each bot. By using your Corebots in combat, you’ll also see their general level increasing, too. This allows you to pour more Fusion Energy into their stats, making them much stronger and far more valuable during the later fights of the main story.

That’s not where the customization and upgrades end with the Corebots. On your adventures across the sandy landscape of Far Eden, you’ll often stumble upon Supply Caches that contain blueprints. These blueprints unlock new parts that you can switch out on a specific Corebot. But to build these, you’ll need a bunch of crafting materials that can be looted by destroying enemies without tearing their cores out. By upgrading the different parts of your Corebots, and bolstering their Core Fusion, you’ll end up with far more powerful companions for your adventures. Therefore, you’ll find yourself frequenting Joule’s Crawler quite often with the help of the fast travel system.

While the visuals may look somewhat good at times, the game suffers heavily on a technical level, and at the strangest moments. While there were bullets firing off all over the screen, particle effects of exploding robots in full motion, and my Corebot dishing out additional damage, the game coped fine. However, wandering across a long desert? The framerate stuttered. I also happened upon a couple of moments where Joule simply fell through the floor to her death, and no matter how many times she respawned it just continued to happen. It took me exiting the game and loading back up to solve the problem, which is pretty painful considering you’re looking at over 30 seconds every time the game loads… for anything.

It was these technical difficulties that really let ReCore down. Painstakingly long load times for simply dying in a small room, fast traveling, or just loading the game up seems out of place in a game that isn’t by any means pushing the Xbox One to its limits. Had ReCore been given that bit of extra polish, the whole 10-12 hour experience would have been lifted.

Ultimately, I’m left in two minds with ReCore. While its platforming and shooting gameplay was fun, if not a tad basic, the story is there to do little more than drive things forward, and the environment it all comes in is dull and not enjoyable to explore. When combined with the need to do exactly that, some crashes causing you to exit and reload, and painful load times, ReCore becomes more of a drag, the more you play. If you’ve got the patience to put up with its load times, and technical blips, there’s a fun and interesting take on the platforming genre here. Just don’t expect the most polished or groundbreaking experience, though.

Score: 3.5/5 – Fair