Review: ReCore is a great game sadly bogged down by several issues

ReCore is out now on Xbox One and Windows 10 and is a fun action adventure game. Sadly, the experience is hindered by a lot of design flaws.  The premise of ReCore is interesting and the game is not linear which is a good thing. Basically you play a young girl named Joule Adams who is on a far away planet called Far Eden. She has woken up from cyrosleep and has to find out what happened to the world.   I will not spoil the story for you, but the game leaves you breadcrumbs along the way that entices you to keep playing it. Not to mention Joule is a likeable character and she is joined by many robot companions that also have a lot of personality.  Joule reminds me of The Force Awakens' Rey in a lot of ways. Both of them are somewhat scavengers living on a desolate sand planet accompanied by a robot. From a story and character standpoint, I love the direction of the game.  The first few hours of ReCore can be a little bit linear. Things open up later on though and then you realise that this is an open-world style of video game. You are free to travel as you please and search through dungeons or collect more parts to level up your robot buddies and more.  The design of Far Eden is also admirable to say the least. ReCore may not have the best graphics in the world, but the game is able to immerse you into the world as it features a lot machinery and landmarks for you to explore.  It's also a game that allows you to do different things. It's not just an average third-person shooter because Joule has boosters on her feet and these can be used to solve jumping puzzle sequences or to go through other cool obstacles. It's refreshing to play since most games are linear where you just run, hide or shoot all of the time.  Shooting does play a part in this game, and it's quite satisfying. Joule is able to lock-on to enemies automatically and she also has unlimited ammo. She can even ask her robot friends to help out in combat which can be quite fun. However, you are forced to level up in this game because if you don't, you'll be dead in the water.  I just described to you the things I like about the game, but now it's onto the negatives. Sadly, the negatives ruin what could have been my second favourite game of 2016 (behind Uncharted 4). The flaws are too big to ignore and this is sad to report.   If you are playing this game on Xbox One, you are going to have a frustrating time waiting for very LONG loading times. The loading times can be over two minutes long and it is very annoying. Even if you die on the same spot, it has to still load for over two minutes all over again.  The technical issues don't stop there either. There was a time I was fighting a boss and Joule would fall underneath the ground for no reason. My friend also played the game on Xbox One and noticed a lot of stuttering and more. To make things even worse, the game also has a big difficulty spike mid-way through it. The game is quite easy for the first few hours, but things start to randomly get much harder. Usually games rise in difficulty gradually but ReCore decides to punish players quite quickly. It wasn't before long that I started to die constantly from normal bad guys... The other annoying thing is that this game halts the progress of the story constantly because there are certain doors that are always locked. In order to open these doors, you have to do the tedious task of looking all over the map for items called "Prismatic Cores". You have to do this quite often and it breaks the flow of the game.  ReCore is not a bad game and I like many parts of it. It's just that there are several issues present that prevent it from being a great game. Hopefully patches are released to eradicate the technical issues and make the load times faster. If you are curious about it, it's still worth checking out since it's only priced at $59.99 NZD here in New Zealand.  Verdict: 7.5/10