ReCore

ReCore was created through a collaboration between the Texas-based Armature Studio, founded by former developers of the Metroid Prime series, and the legendary Japanese creator Keiji Inafune, associated with the Mega Man series. The game takes place on the desert planet Far Eden, where humanity relocated after Earth became uninhabitable, and follows engineer Joule Adams as she wakes from cryosleep into a world ruled by hostile robots and buried under drifts of sand.

Joule travels the planet with a crew of robotic companions in animal forms — the dog-like Mack, the spider-like Seth, and the bird-like Duncan — each offering different abilities for movement and combat, and switchable on the fly: one digs objects out of the sand, another climbs along rails, and a third smashes through obstacles. The combat system is built around color-coding enemies by core type, which must be weakened with a correspondingly colored shot before it can be ripped out with a rope as a trophy and used to upgrade the player's own robots. The open world combines platforming sections with double jumps and dashes in the Metroidvania tradition with action combat and a light system for building robots from found parts.

At launch, the game suffered from technical problems including disproportionately long loading times and an unfinished feel in its final areas, where the ending required gathering a large number of cores and felt more like padding out playtime. This led to a mixed reception despite a strong artistic concept, likeable main characters, and an unusually fluid feel of movement that the studio's history with the Metroid Prime series certainly did not lack. A later expanded version addressed some of the criticism. ReCore nonetheless remains an interesting example of collaboration between Western and Japanese development approaches within Microsoft's exclusive program, and a reminder of how thin the line is between an original idea and unrealized potential.