PixlBit

I returned to ReCore, after having played the demo in 2017, a few weeks ago on a random spin of the "Surprise Me" button on Xbox and enjoyed it enough to keep going with it all that week. Check it out. 

You play as Joule, a woman who has just awoken from cyrosleep to a desert environment full of broken machinery and robots gone wild. You can shoot stuff and fight hand-to-hand in a fast and satisfying third-person view. Your weapons have three elemental colors that, if matched with enemies, deal more damage. You have a grapple cable which can pull energy cores out of robots. The mechanic is a lot like what's used in fishing games: you hook the target, and then manage the tension until you pull the core free. You use the cores to upgrade and get new stuff. You acquire a robo-dog-friend early on which you can command to dig up stuff and help you fight. You can upgrade and customize it too. Fun!

Keiji Inafune, producer on many Mega Man games, came up with the concept and Joseph Staten, Bungie's head writer for the Halo series, wrote it. The story is you are on a distant planet from Earth that was intended to be a new haven. Robots were sent first and then people in cryo until the robots finished terraforming the planet, but something went wrong and you wake up to a desert and a lot of messed up robots. Your mission is to survive, figure out what went wrong and fix it. I didn't get so far as to solve anything, but I enjoyed the fights, resource collecting and upgrading. 

I thought the game looked great and the gameplay fast and engaging. It got some criticism for being repetitive, but I didn't play long enough to experience that, plus, I think I was playing the Definitive Edition which fixed a lot of the problems it had at launch. One of these days, I'll devote myself to finishing it. I think it's worth it.