Armored Core 4

Aug. 18, 2008

I'm a big fan of feeling big and blowing up tons of things, so I decided to try out this game. That's about all there was to it. Also, I drank beer while playing this game. It may have affected the review.

Category

Mech Fighter

Pros

• The tutorial was light and taught me the basics.
• The graphics are good for the game, desert scenes were especially interesting to look at. Though, the action was so frantic I usually didn't get a chance to look around.
• Highly customizable armors would be a lot of fun to get into, if you are into this sort of game.

Cons

• The controls were, to say the least, completely unintuitive. I could barely aim, I could never tell who I was shooting at, and the auto-lock system that I was taught in the tutorials I could never get to work.
• The extremely fast action of this game was a little too fast for me, especially while I was learning how to play.
• The missions were either ridiculously easy or bafflingly hard. Due to this, I never got a chance to learn anything. I either won by button mashing the fire keys, or died easily by getting shot to bits when button mashing didn't work.
• The missions were also really short. Some of them, the pre-mission briefing took longer to watch than the mission itself took to complete.
• The story didn't grip me in the slightest. There was just too much information packed into too few words - half of them were proper nouns, naming things I just didn't know anything about. It felt like a detailed explanation would have helped given me a bit more context and understanding. Plus, the game was extraordinarily dark in mood, which didn't make me feel like playing it.
• I didn't have any connection to my character. Was I one person, or many people? Who knows? I'm just some guy in a mech.
• The one boss fight I came across was as easy as pressing X and A over and over again. That's dumb.
• The design of the game gave me no sense of scale while I played. That is, while I was in a huge mech and running around a city, I never felt particularly large. I wanted to play so I could feel like a huge killing machine, but instead it just felt like I was fighting in a model city, like on Power Rangers.
• The game provides you with some pre-built armor configurations, which I passed up at first. I later decided to try my hand at building a mech; when I realized how complex it was, I went back to the schematics, only to find them all GONE. Apparently if you try to roll your own mech, the game gives you a big "fuck you" to using their pre-built schematics. That is just awful, and I can't understand why anyone would have done this on purpose - I'm fairly sure it was a bug, but one that was so bad it really destroyed my chances of having a good mech.

Verdict

This game was frustrating and not fun. No, I would not play it again.

I'm beginning to see how many of the games I play fall into the long-tail theory of game sales - that is, that you can make money by selling games that play to a particular crowd. While I didn't like this game, I bet a mech fanatic would love it. Same with a lot of the other games I played... the main deterrant from enjoyment was that I wasn't interested in the main game itself. But does that mean the genre is limited only to people who enjoy that genre? I don't think so - I think these games could be much better.