If you’ve sat there thinking “boy, it sure would be neat to have a Tron video game”, then Recompile might just be the game for you.
Recompile
Developer: Phigames
Price: $20 (PC) / $25 (PS5/XSX)
Platform: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Recompile has you playing as a program in a computer trying to fix broken sectors of a mainframe while you piece together what exactly went wrong with everything. The entirety of its story is told through collectibles you’ll find scattered through the levels, detailing the discussions between an AI (whose computer you’re within) and its human scientists, and for the most part, a lot of this writing is genuinely engaging. None of it is particularly groundbreaking, it hits the same beats you’ve seen in any AI movie or book, but there’s a lot of personality to the writing that unfortunately falls into a predictable, and slightly anticlimactic finale.
Now Recompile pitches itself as a Metroidvania, but it’s closer to a standard action platformer than any game from that genre. While the game regularly encourages you to treat it like a Metroidvania you won’t really be doing any of the genre staples. There’s a hub with four zones you’ll go to, but they’re not really interconnected, and you’ll never hit a roadblock that requires you to backtrack to another zone for a particular power-up, save for one single moment.
It’s honestly quite a bit odd how often the game pushes you to circle back to other levels to find upgrades for your powers when for one, you’d have to backtrack and then redo huge chunks of platforming segments, and two, you don’t actually need any of the upgrades. I did each of the four levels in a single go, save for one that *actually* needed an ability from a previous level. It’s probably my main complaint of the game, that it set these expectations of what sort of game it was going to be and while what it delivered was still good, the entire time I played I was wondering when the “Metroidvania” was going to kick in.
Being an action platformer, you can expect to do a lot of platforming and it’s for the most part pretty fun purely because of the visuals that help elevate what you’re doing. And it also helps that the game has one of the most satisfying double jumps I’ve seen in a while. Between those segments you’ll find rogue programs that need deleting and you’ve got two ways of dealing with them: cold hard murder or hacking. The gunplay in this game is fine, basic but fine. You’ll get a transforming gun that morphs into pretty much every basic firearm, that all end up being pointless the moment you acquire the grenade launcher. I happened to do the level that had that weapon first, so for the remainder of the game I exclusively used that gun, which made every combat encounter a complete breeze; more-so when paired with the time-slow ability. It’s just an oddly overpowered combo to receive so early in the game, that even made boss fights trivial as I just activated slo-mo (it’s infinite as is your ammo) and spammed grenades at them. I didn’t mind this *too* much however, as I was mainly playing to uncover the story and just immerse myself in the game’s absolutely gorgeous aesthetic.
But even more bizarre is the game’s hacking system. When you kill enemies they’ll drop bits that you can use as currency to hack into enemies to turn them into friends, or outright explode them. And it’s something I never used because why do that when I can pop one or two grenades to their face and keep walking? I think I hacked an enemy once, just to see what it did and never again. I had so many bits leftover by the end of the game it was just silly.
Hacking is also used in the game’s logic puzzles that you’ll only ever see a handful of times throughout the game. You’ll come across these pipe systems that need to be activated to send energy down the pipeline to trigger an activator on the other end. Most of these are pretty straightforward, but a few need some actual forethought and rhythm. Or, you can spend your bits to just force the puzzle solution. It’s an interesting balancing act of deciding whether to use your bits for a puzzle you’re struggling with, or a combat encounter. The issue with this however is the combat is never particularly difficult to require hacking enemies, and you’ll only ever encounter these logic puzzles in a handful of areas early on. This leads to a hacking system you’ll never interact with. As someone who’s a fan of logic puzzles in games, it’s hugely disappointing to only get a tiny handful of them, and even then only a tiny amount of those required any actual thought.
The Final Word
Recompile is a frustrating game. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad game because I still had a lot of fun with it and definitely recommend playing it, as I knocked out the entire thing in a single session. But it’s full of half-baked ideas that really could have used some more time in the oven.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
