Seeing a game get better over time is fantastic. When that game is roughly five years old, though, there’s something a little tragic about it, too. The reviews have come and gone. People have moved on to the latest and greatest. There’s no guarantee people will go back to that old release with fresh eyes and an open mind. Such is the tale of ReCore.
To me, the game is a fun platformer with Metroidvania elements to it. It remains a blast to play on PC, which was the premier place to play it when it launched. But the Xbox One simply wasn’t capable of doing it justice. Even when the game got an Xbox One X facelift, the puny little processor in that console still capped ReCore at a measly 30 frames-per-second. It was pretty bunk for a game that relies so heavily on jumping, dashing, and shooting, and asks you to do all three at the same time.
Then the Xbox Series X came along with its fancy FPS Boost tech. Finally, in 2021, ReCore is a good console game.
For those playing on Microsoft’s top-of-the-line machine, the Xbox One X upgrades remain intact. That means ReCore on Xbox Series X comes in at a crisp 4K resolution. But the game always looked pretty good. That was never the real issue.
What FPS Boost does is crank the game’s framerate up to a much more playable 60 FPS. It seems a bit corny to call this upgrade “game-changing,” but it is. By doubling that FPS number, everything you do in ReCore suddenly feels a lot more fluid. Really, a title of this type needs to be played at a higher frame rate. Now, nearly five years after it first dropped onto an Xbox console, ReCore pulls it off.
If you skipped out on this one initially due to the middling reviews, you owe it to yourself to go back and give it another look. It’s on Xbox Game Pass right now, along with a bunch of other FPS Boost games.
