[Summary 5 out of 10]:

From www.recoregame.com:
You are Joule Adams, a young survivor of a terrible cataclysm who journeys from Earth to the desert world, “Far Eden” to build mankind’s new home. But when Joule wakes after centuries in cryo-sleep, nothing has gone according to plan… With her “Corebot” companion, Mack, Joule begins an adventure to unlock secrets from the past, defeat powerful foes, and bring new life and hope to Far Eden.

 

What it’s like:

It’s an adventure game with a little bit of action, and a good deal of robots.

 

The Great:

The robots. Hands down, this is the best part. This is why I was drawn to the game, and this is what kept me playing. They are wonderfully designed, and fun to have around. They make the best noises, as well. I really like the upgrades, and the different parts that you can get for each robot. I like the variety in the robots, as well. They each have their own personalities, and they react to one another and situations differently.

The visual design of the game itself: It’s beautiful. The colors are striking. The characters are interesting to look at, the landscape is maybe not the most complex thing to look at, but it’s also not boring or overly repetitive. Considering that you’re on a wasteland of a planet, this can be a tough thing to overcome.

 

The Good:

The story is in itself interesting. I like the concept that they came up with. I like the way that they unveil more of it, as well. Instead of it all being laid out in front of you, you find recordings. Bit by bit, you learn the truth.

Controls for this game are pretty easy to pick up. I didn’t have problems getting Joule to do what I wanted her to do, and I didn’t have much of a learning curve before I felt comfortable. Only one mechanic had a little bit of an issue, but it wasn’t quite enough to get frustrated at.

I had a lot of fun with the beginning of this game. A lot. I was really happy with the purchase, and super excited to tell all my friends about it.

The Bad:

Unfortunately, the game itself doesn’t seem to be well thought through. It almost feels as if they didn’t have anybody play testing it all the way to the end.

The amount of grinding that has to be done to progress through the game is absurd. This isn’t a MMO. This isn’t even a RPG. It’s supposed to be an action adventure game. It also has a fairly linear storyline. Unfortunately, you have to keep backtracking to go forward. You have to go through dungeons you’ve already done over and over again. There are some places you can’t open just because you’re not the right level yet, and others you can’t get into because you don’t have the right number of spheres. I, unfortunately, hit a point where I couldn’t progress because I didn’t have the right number of spheres, and I couldn’t get the ONE SPHERE I needed, because I wasn’t high enough level to get into the dungeon that would yield it.

This is about where I stopped playing, because the grinding wasn’t fun.

I also ran into the issue that switching out the robots became tedious. It’s all fun and games to have multiple robot buddies, right up until you end up not having the right one, and no immediate switching mechanic. You have to run over to an appointed station to switch and go all the way back to your spot. Which is, admittedly, better than having to go all the way back to the ship, but only slightly.

The actual upgrades for the robots seemed to do very little, as well. You can pump as much into each stat as you want to, but the impact seems minimal at best.

And now to my big issue: The save mechanic. I’m getting frustrated with game designers and their inability to solidify an autosave standard. In this game, I found myself having to redo ENTIRE SECTIONS, sometimes up to 10 minutes of gameplay, because of where the autosave point was arbitrarily triggered. This is incredibly frustrating. If a game isn’t going to give a player the option of when to save, then autosave needs to be much better than what it is in ReCore. I – more than once, mind – stopped playing this game after dying and discovering that I would have to replay a huge chunk of game to get back to where I was.

And why are we not giving players the option of manually saving? Why do games leave this out? I don’t get it.

 

 

Conclusion [5 out of 10]:

This game had so much potential. I was so excited for it. Sadly, I have yet to finish it, and I don’t know if I will. The aggravating points – the grind, the save issues, the robot switching (which probably wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t already upset with the other two things, but is still bad) – are SO aggravating, that I don’t know if I want to finish this game.

I’m disappointed to say that I would not recommend this game to others.