ReCore – Metroid Prime for the current gen?

GameCentral talks to industry legend Keiji Inafune and the director of Metroid Prime about the Xbox One’s most unusual new exclusive.

It’s getting towards the end of the second day at E3, and we suspect some people are getting tired. We certainly feel for the poor developers, who have to demonstrate the same segment of game again and again to journalists of widely varying levels of enthusiasm. The bunch we’re in with for ReCore seem an especially apathetic bunch, glued to their smartphones and refusing to ask a single question. But we’re more than happy to use up all the Q&A time for ourselves; not least because the guy sitting next to us is Mark Pacini, director of Metroid Prime.



If we’d been around to review it at the time the original Metroid Prime on GameCube would’ve got an unequivocal 10/10. Although many, including us, consider predecessor Super Metroid to be a perfect game we’d argue that Metroid Prime is equally faultless, and all the more impressive because it was trying to adapt a 2D game into a 3D world and was a collaboration between Japanese and Western companies – and that almost never works out. But it did with Metroid Prime and so far the same also seems to be happening with ReCore.

ReCore is a collaboration between Armature Studio, which is staffed by many veterans of the Metroid Prime series, and Comcept, the Japanese developer set-up by Mega Man designer Keiji Inafune. On paper that’s a highly impressive talent pool, and yet since moving away from the companies and franchises where they made their names both have struggled. Armature’s highest profile release has been the disappointing Batman: Arkham Origins – Blackgate and Comcept has just released the near disastrous Mighty No. 9. It’s not much of a compliment, but ReCore already looks like the best thing either company has ever done.


ReCore – Mack is a girl’s best friend

‘Mark and I were fortunate enough to be friends from when I was still at Capcom’, says Inafune when we ask him about the collaboration. ‘And during that time we tried to launch a project, but it didn’t quite work out. But we’ve always been in touch and we were talking with each other and discussing new ideas and new ways we can collaborate. So after I launched Comcept we had this idea, sort of this high level concept, that we took to Mark and we started moulding it and discussing it and fleshing it out. And once it was in a presentable state we took it to Microsoft, who took a liking to it.’

We ask Inafune why it is that Armature and Retro Studios [the developer behind Metroid Prime] are able to succeed where so many other team-ups have failed, and he has a very clear answer: ‘I think a lot of it stems from the respect and trust we have for both of our respective companies and visions, and I think a lot of what you said about relationships not working out comes from that sense of doubt or inability to communicate… not just through language but also through creative visions and ideologies.’

‘And I think with our partnership, both of our art directors had a lot of respect for each other and even when they would not quite agree they would be able to work it out and come up with a very nice, healthy hybrid of all of the ideas. The conversation becomes much more honest and much more candid. With Mark’s team, I think they have a very high understanding of what the Japanese perspective is and when we would communicate with them they would already get it, so to speak. So all of our communication would start on the same page.’

Before meeting the developers we’d played a hands-on demo of the game, and it wasn’t hard to see the similarities with Metroid Prime. The mix of combat and gadget-based puzzle solving seemed immediately familiar, despite ReCore being a third person game with some very different gimmicks. It’s more of a stretch to make comparisons to 3D game Mega Man Legends, and yet a combination of the two games is the easiest way to describe ReCore.



The story has you playing as the immediately likeable Joule Adams, one of the last surviving humans on a desert planet called Far Eden. Luckily for her she has several robot helpers, including the dog-like Mack, the spider-like Seth, and the musclebound (if robots had muscles) Duncan. Joule has woken up from cryosleep to find her terraforming mission has gone awry and all the other robots have turned against her.

Each of her robot allies has a different special ability, with Mack able to sniff for clues, Seth being able to walk up special railings so that Joule can grapple onto him, and Duncan able to lift heavy objects. All have their own special move style attack though, that takes a while to charge up, and since you can only have one robot active at a time the idea is you rotate them in and out like a tag team fighting game.

ReCore – puzzles are just as important as combat

But as helpful as the robots are it’s still Joule that does most of the fighting, with a powerful gun that has a very satisfying lock-on system that lets you cycle between nearby enemies (not dissimilar to Metroid Prime). The gun also takes one of four colour-coded types of ammo, with each robot enemy susceptible to a particular hue. Picking the right one, and ensuring you have enough ammo at any one time, creates some interesting tactics – especially when you’re trying to rack up a combo at the same time. The level we played was apparently from some hours into the game, and unlike most demos wasn’t designed to be trivially easy.


The platforming was actually quite hard, with Joule making use of a tricky-to-time forward dash, and none of the puzzles were spelled out in a way that was obvious to us. The combat is also fun, with real thought required for both crowd and ammo control. Although we will say that some of the encounters seemed to go on for a little too long, with the game appearing to rely too heavily on the old ‘lock you in an area with some bad guys and don’t let you out until they’re all dead’ trick.

Whether that’s a problem in the game as a whole we’ll have to wait and see, as apparently the demo is more ‘combat-orientated’ than others areas, but overall we came away very impressed by an experience that’s not quite like anything else at E3. So we’re a bit shocked to find out that ReCore is not actually a full price game, but instead is being sold at an unusual £29.99 price point. (And yet stranger still there is a £100+ collector’s edition with a statute of Joule and Mack.)

ReCore – Joule is packing a considerable amount of heat

‘What we wanted to do with ReCore is… obviously it feels like it’s a different type of game compared to the normal first party products of Microsoft’, says Pacini. ‘We wanted to really reach a broad audience with this game and by no means do we want it to be an easy game – we want it to be approachable but we want it to have a challenge – and at the same time if our main goal is to reach a broader audience we thought, especially coupled with the Xbox Play Anywhere initiative, it made sense to price it at a lower price point to get it into more players’ hands’.


In other words, the average gamer is so resistant to trying anything new that the only way they could hope to attract more people is to make the game cheaper than normal.

‘That’s kind of what we’re hoping for’, says Pacini. ‘Because I think it fits within the line-up of Microsoft products, but it is different. It’s an unusual offering. I think it’s hedging our bets on the idea that, “Hey, we want people to try it and we want people to give it a shot”. And especially as you buy it once and you can play it on either Xbox One or Windows 10 it has that, “Oh, maybe I’ll give it a shot. Maybe I’ll try it” appeal. And that’s what we’re hoping for’.

Whether you see that as a damning indictment of the modern full price games market or a sensibly pragmatic approach to the current status quo is up to you. All we know is the game looks extremely interesting and we’re very happy to shake Pacini’s hand at the end, for being responsible for one of our favourite games ever and, hopefully, a worthy successor in the form of ReCore.

Formats: Xbox One and PC

Publisher: Microsoft Studios

Developer: Comcept and Armature Studio

Release Date: 16th September 2016

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