ReCore was one of the games announced at E3 a while ago that really pricked my ears. Shit, a cool female protagonist in a world full of robots? That sounds right up my alley considering I was apparently the only person on the planet that liked Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, a game consigned to the same bin as Mirror’s Edge and Remember Me, both awesome games which deserved a lot more attention.

But don’t get me wrong, ReCore doesn’t belong in that bin, it belongs in a completely different bin, namely the one that gets cleaned out on recycling day. At least that was my impression after playing it for an hour. Take this review with a massive grain of salt, as I didn’t get to the point you unlock a little robot that railroads you across paths and adds a little more variety to the third person platforming action that looks like it belongs on the PS2. This game feels old, it feels tired. It feels like a lackluster clone of every 3rd person action adventure game that requires you to stand on a plate to open a door or gather little keys to plug into a door that allows the plate to open it.

I’m purposefully leaving out the video promos for this game because they’re not an accurate depiction for how bland this game is. The cutscenes in this game are few and far between which is good cause the camera shots are uninspired and the acting is terrible. Fortunately most of the characters are robots, but even those are annoying. You’ll know what I mean when you come across the Clank type robot.

Here’s the controls, left trigger locks onto whatever the fuck is in front of you, right trigger kills them. You can mix it up by doing a slightly bigger shot at a slower rate or change you bullet colour to harm enemies of the same colour. Wow. Amazing.

Also you have a repetitive finisher where you tug out the core of a robot to go “re” it into something else.

You also have robot companions who can be crafted into different looking robots.

Overall the game made me feel like I was going back in time to a place where Ape Escape was still the business. The dashes and double jumps could probably get more fun further in as more platforming mechanics are added, but this this game coupled with terrible voice acting is just a turd that I really don’t want to revisit. So I won’t.

In my short playtime I didn’t encounter the bugs which are getting all the hype at the moment. I just wish it was as cool as it looked in the teasers. I really do.