Phantom Crash

"Buy this game if you like Armored Core games, or if you like a good story. Or both. Do not buy if you have the emotional capacity of a turnip."

This is a great game. You can configure your mech in a wide variety of ways, and there are three different manufacturers with distinct styles, PLUS there is some overlap, so you can use a heavy mech manufacturer's chassis and still end up with a fast mech.

Storywise, the game struck me as somewhat bland at first, but it picked up once I realized how to trigger story events -win. The more you win, the further the story progresses.

The music in this game is also great, in my opinion, but your mileage may vary.

The difficulty of the game was moderate; not hard enough to be frustrating, but not easy enough to be a breeze. Every time I thought I was set, a powerful enemy came and smacked me out of my complacency. Each configuration has it's own unique vulnerabilities which you must compensate for, for example; I depended upon cloaking when my life got low, and rushing to find some armor repair nanites, preferably before the cloak ran out. The problem with this was that some enemies have 'chips' -AI aides,- upgraded enough so that they could spot me, or at least tell that SOMETHING was in my general vicinity. In my experience these enemies tended to have chainguns or machine guns.

They then proceeded to rapid fire me, knocking me out of my cloak, and then shredding me into little bits, or if they had missiles, they'd smack the bejesus out of me. Either way, the result is one very dead player.

I beat the final boss in an insanely cheesy manner, -using the blasts from my dual recoilless cannons and refusing to face her head on,- because the first 3-5 times I tried to beat her, she raped me, flipped me over, and raped me again -_-. This is not a boss to be taken lightly. You can pound on her for a while, to little-to-moderate effect, and then suddenly WHAM you will get knocked around in a way that you haven't ever experienced in previous matches, and your health will have taken a nasty hit. A few encounters like that and you'll be kissing the concrete in no time.

I went through pretty much the entire game with the same configuration, periodically modifying the contents of my optional item slots, and increasing the weight bearing capacity of my legs to deal with those changes. This is less the fault of the game and more my lack of creativity. Plus I didn't like how the Xbox controller works with this game; the left and right triggers work for the left and right weapons, and the shoulder weapons are the y and x buttons, which can be really inconvinent since you have to use your right thumb -or if you like to stretch your finger out like my brother does to melee in Halo, your index finger,- every time you want to use them. This is excabrated by the fact that you NEED to use the right joystick most of the time, though this can be mitigated by upgrading your Chip AI.

I should mention that for maybe a quarter -or less- of the game I used a slightly different config, partly due to money concerns. I switched to my present, main configuration when I started to find my machine guns running out of ammo at the worst possible times.

Throughout the game, though, I ignored shoulder weapons completely. In hindsight I suppose the extra weight -or rather, the lack thereof- helped me a great deal, probably enabling me to win many battles I wouldn't have otherwise.

Personally I think they should have made it so that L3 and R3 -that is, pushing down the left joystick, and the right joystick, respectively,- fired the arm weapons, and the triggers fired the shoulder weapons, or maybe vice versa. -shrug-

The only boss I had problems with was the final one. Oh yeah, and also the first one that I faced -he may not be the first one that you face, however,- the other boss battles weren't nearly that close, though they had some hair raising moments.

Since my strategy is basically to slug it out and try to avoid getting hit, all my fights tended to be pretty one-sided.

Its pretty much exactly the same strategy as I use in armored core, not because I especially like it -though there is that :D,- but because it seems so darn consistently effective. Dual high explosive weapons on the arms, stock up on armor as much as I can without affecting mobility too drastically, strafe when fired upon, and mash the fire button(s) until the opponent(s) is a steaming hulk of scrap.

Its a technique I like to call, Dodge dodge smash. Or just smash, for short. :P.

I am sure that there are many other ways to beat the game, just as there are probably many other methods in the armored core series, but that is what seemed to work the best for me.

In conclusion, the sound is good, the music is good, the graphics are great, the replayability is great, the story is good to great; buy this game.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 01/01/03, Updated 01/01/03