Armored Core 4

"Lazy and disappointing"

Introduction

In short and traditionally so, the Armored Core series is one about giant robots duking it out over several square feet of desolate wastelands simply to prove who is the best giant robot. Often there are some evil corporations involved who are constantly trying to uncover a more malevolent means of robot building – however, they always find that some lines man was not meant to cross, and they always realize their mistakes in the end. Of course, the mistake they realize is that surely this time the reason why the giant robot wasn't controllable was because it wasn't powerful enough, but I suppose you just can't convince some evil scientists that removing the “kill for” loop in the programming would be a more productive means of solving their problems.

All things considered it's a pretty straightforward cyberpunk game that fits quite nicely into the genre, essentially epitomizing most of the details that make cyberpunk what it is. However, Armored Core 4 is a game designed for the next generation of consoles and the new era of gaming, if it can so presumptuously be called, and as such it falls generally flat on its face in all areas possible for as long it possibly can.

Plot

The storyline is my first major gripe; not because it contains the most problems – most any game whose central thesis is “I will destroy everything” doesn't need a great story – but rather because I believe the game's plotline gives a really firm idea of what a small amount of interested thought actually went into the production of this game.

To be blunt - which is all this game is to the point of absurdity - you play the part of a skilled pilot behind the wheel of a “Next,” which is short for next-generation or something. Right away you may notice that the world's military is a little short-sighted seeing as how they'll feel a little silly constantly referring to outdated models as “Nexts” in twenty years, but I suppose with a continued lack of creativity they could just name that year's most cutting-edge designs “Next Nexts” if they really want. The world is regularly facing certain death and catastrophe, so what are the odds they'll even make it to the next twenty years anyway, I suppose?

Believe it or not, that's pretty much the whole story. Honestly, the game fills you in on so few details that your mission briefing might as well read as, “Hey, pilot! I'm enjoying a really great grilled-cheese sandwich! Blow up anything marked as red on your radar screen,” for every mission. To give an example of just how little you know what's going on through the game, in the very last mission I'm rushed out of my base on an emergency call and thrown into the battlefield with a robot twice my size.

“Hey,” the man in the over-sized robot says drowsily into my insecure radio line, “I guess there's no need for conversation.”
And then he shot me in the face with a bazooka.

After I blew him up he mumbled something unmemorable into my radio and died, and so far I'm still no closer to figuring out who the heck the guy in the giant robot was, but I feel absolutely certain that the game seemed to think I should know or care. It was as if throughout the game my character was having conversations with important characters off-screen and I only got to see the parts just before he was dropped into the mission zones. On top of that, if you play that same mission on hard mode you'll be attacked by a second opponent who I'm completely positive you don't meet anywhere else, and the game still sets an atmosphere sopping wet with drama when he gets killed.

So between killing countless strangers and feeling like you aren't being let in on any important parts of the story, it's safe to say that there isn't much to be said for the plot of this game. The only character with any reoccurring lines is generally your girlfriend or whatever she is, and for the most part she only complains about how much it sucks to be at war, and while that is a good explanation as to why she decided to help out the world's most sophisticated efforts at mass murder, it doesn't do much as far as character development is concerned.

Gameplay

As for the gameplay: it's a mixed bag enough that I'm not sure how to feel about it. The controls are fine and everything is pretty fast-paced, but all in all I find the game has a great deal of balance issues. For single player it's fine because every mission is just the same repeated story of flying at the enemy and blowing him up with your over-sized weapon under varying circumstances. It doesn't really matter what the enemy is equipped with, and sooner or later you'll figure out that if you land on the sky fortresses they won't be able to shoot you as you nonchalantly stab them to death with your laser sword (take advantage of this because it's the only time you'll be able to hit anything with a laser sword).

The place where it really becomes a problem is in multiplayer, whether it be with friends or online. See, for whatever reason the game designers thought it would be totally awesome to include a few select weapons that have the capability of killing almost any opponent in somewhere between one to four hits. These weapons all have drawbacks such as a high energy cost, a charge time, or the forced removal of some of your extra parts, but in general any time your friend kills you with a single shot from a high-speed laser you'll have an awfully hard time feeling like you've played through a fair fight.

Some might say that I should stop whining and get good at the game, but the game includes a built-in targeting system with an automatic lock-on that attempts to always fire at where I'm going to be, so that whole skill argument doesn't really apply, does it? Every time my friend got lucky and his targeting computer predicted my movement correctly I got incinerated; hands down! So in the end it boiled down to his luck and my futile hopes that I might duck left at precisely the moment his enormous death-laser fired.

Aside from this the game includes a feature called Kojima particles and primal armor and what-have-you. Your “Primal Armor” is some kind of radiation shield that prevents you from being killed in less than ten seconds during combat. Sure that sounds cool at first, until you realize that your primal armor is depleted simply by taking fire and that you can scarcely function without it. Generally, in such a fast-paced game, it really breaks the flow when you have to stop flying desperately around your opponent like a drunken wasp with a machine gun to wait for you armor to recharge. On top of that, while you're sitting in your lawn chair and sipping lemonade, your opponent is taking pot shots at you with his grenade launcher. In short, your primal armor is not your health, but having health at all is a complete waste of time when losing your primal armor means you're incapable of withstanding attacks anyway.

Selling-points

If the game weren't a series its saving grace would be the customizability options. The ability to customize your robot to look and perform however you feel like has in the past been a major selling point for me with these games. You can paint even the smallest details any color you want, right down to the stupid unicorn horns you glue on your forehead for increased balance. Granted the game's fantastic graphics at the time of writing this review, that's great: you're robots can look really great! It even gave me the option to stamp pictures of ladies all over my robot, and you may judge me but I did it! I stamped those ladies all over my robot – my robot was the most heterosexual tool of destruction at the robot fair!

However, the game is a series, and if that's what you're going for a lot of the previous games have what feels like maybe five times as many pieces of equipment to fit your robot with and much of the same color customization. Unfortunately it appears that moving to the next generation console with next generation graphics meant having to rebuild the graphics of every part of the robots from scratch, and as a past player of previous installments I really felt the hurt on this one. My robots looked different for the most part, but because of the limited selection none of them really felt all that different. Light, heavy, middle weights – all pretty much the same as far as I could tell. I was used to the difference being, well, huge and full of varied advantages.

Music

Music was completely un-noteworthy in this game. I really can't discredit the game for that, but in general I barely noticed it was there at all except for when I was trying to dance to it while waiting for the next event to take place. All I could really manage to do was slide back and forth on my rocket boots and hop around a little, but in the end I feel that I guess I did the composers justice.

Graphics

Most video game graphics these days are awesome since the typical snobby gamer won't even make eye contact with a company that neglects its graphics division. This game is no exception, so generally what I'm saying is that it's just another face in the crowd.

Odds and ends

One thing that really irks me about this game is that the company that released it thought that an online connection would be excuse enough to ignore its mistakes. That is to say that you can go online and download “regulation” files to correct some of the glaring balance mistakes that are present in the game, and you can do so at your convenience as the developers release each new patch.

While some people think this is great that the game can be improved after being released, the way in which they've done this gets in underneath my fingernails and just gnaws away at my liver like a bunch of pissy fire ants. The balance and design flaws in this game are so bad that “glaring” is actually an inappropriate word. Glaring is a passive aggressive act that maybe you do to openly let someone know you're trying to antagonize them. This game's flaws do not “glare:” they leap out of the bushes, run at you for fifteen yards through an open field and then kick you in the head. That's right, you see them coming like an angry silverback gorilla for a full fifteen yards before they actively bypass antagonizing you and go straight into beating the living hell out of your pathetic and soon lifeless body.

You can't possibly miss the flaws of the first “regulation” of the game unless you close your eyes, plug your ears, shoot up with a fatal amount of morphine, and make-believe, and yet somehow the game got released with a bleeding price tag on it! Then they said - as if it would excuse them - that all you have to do is continue paying fees to use the internet service and sooner or later they'll make the game playable for you. I don't care how they sugar coat it, they weren't releasing an obviously crappy game to see everyone's reaction so that they could improve from there; they were lazy, and that makes me angry.

Conclusion

All things considered, I really can't say that this game outshines any other by any particular aspect, and in fact I believe it was truly released for the fanboys of the series who couldn't care less what happens to it as long as it continues. All I can really say is thanks to all the fanboys out there who continue to take no interest in the quality of their favorite companies' productions. If you really love somebody's work, criticize it.

Score
I give the game a 6/10 because somewhere during mathematically defining my opinions I think I forgot to divide by Avogadro's number.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/06/08

Game Release: Armored Core 4 (US, 03/20/07)