Armored Core 4

The Armored Core series has an extremely faithful following due to its extremely in-depth customization of the Mechs that you pilot. Even though the newest game is entitled Armored Core 4, there have been many games over the past several years or so that carry the Armored Core brand name. This game is the first one that is on the “next generation” consoles, and the question is how does it stack up?

The Armored Core series is not known for its story mode in any way, shape, or form. All you need to know is that the there are many battles going on around the world. You are hired by a mercenary group to help eliminate the faction that is causing such an uproar and basically to save humanity. That is about as deep as the story for this game goes. After you get this briefing in the beginning of the game you are taken to a really nice and easy-to-learn tutorial mode that will show you how to do just about everything that you need to do in the game to win and survive.

The game flow is pretty simple as well. Once you finish the tutorial you will go into the chapter screen which will show the various missions you can go to. You will then go through each mission beating it to the best of your ability, meaning less time, not using much ammo, and not taking much damage. Depending on how you did you will get a reward that can be spent on repairing and upgrading your Mech. The problem with this is that many missions are trial and error because you never know what type of weapons are needed until you are actually in a mission, so it is not uncommon to do many of the games missions, which can get really annoying at times.

There are more than 30 missions in this game, and to be honest it only feels like only a few. The main reason for that is that many of the missions are identical to some that you did earlier in the game. Which brings me to a huge irritation: various missions will have you protecting something from hordes of incoming enemies. It is really hard to stop them all since you will have to continuously going forward and back to shoot them all down. This is made even more difficult since you “battle area” is so small, which makes it near to impossible to shoot all of the enemies down. Why did the developer’s give you such a small area to take everything down is beyond me, but it will get on your nerves.

This game also offers a really shallow multiplayer gameplay. You can play either system link, split screen, or online. All of them don’t offer a variety of different ways to play other then may the best person win. This is really shallow and I was hoping that this game would offer some more in-depth multiplayer to match up with the depth of the robot customization. It is really interesting to go online to see the other creations that people make, but other then that this game will not keep you coming back for more unless you are a die hard fan of this franchise.

When a new generation of consoles hits, it is always a “break” for the developers until a game comes along and set the benchmark. Well, in this post-Gears of Wars gaming era, graphics have been taken up a notch, and anything that doesn’t compare is usually “ragged” upon. Armor Core 4 is such a game, it is a decent looking game, but now gamers expect much more from games. The problem with this game is that all of the environments are particularly bland and plain looking, and to make matters worse the draw-in distance is very short.

On the flip side of things is that when you are customizing your Mech you will be able to see all of the new changes automatically. This includes when you exchange and put new weapons and even changing the various physically parts and color scheme it. This is really fun to see what the other players around the world are creating and see if they look like anything that you might have seen in Transformers, Gundam, and any other Mech oriented show. This is this series bread and butter, being able to change almost anything you want about your Mech as long as you have enough money to do so.

The audio for this game is better than in previous games, but it really isn’t spectacular. The music will help guide you when you are in more intense battles, but it doesn’t move you or give you the sense of urgency like it should. The sound effects are also decently done, from all of the gun fire, explosions, and other things you will hear while in a war zone. The voice acting for this game is also decent, but it will get annoying to hear the mission briefings multiple times because you died.

Armored Core 4 is rated teen and contains fantasy violence and mild suggestive themes.