Armored Core: For Answer

"Probably not an essential addition to your video game collection"

Introduction

For those who don't know, Armored Core is of, what I feel, a more and more rarely seen genre known as “cyber punk,” a form of entertainment derived from the idea that science and the free market will one day destroy us all with sentient robots. Furthermore, excluding recent iterations of the game, Armored Core tends to be very good at expressing these beliefs, namely by interacting with me on an intellectual level as infrequently or as unrealistically as possible. Typically we have a good time, Armored Core and I, but during our last visit with one another Armored Core did some really hurtful things to me, and we parted with feelings of wistful distrust towards one another.

Today, however, the game has come back to my doorstep with a bouquet of flowers and promises that the killer robots only went mad because they weren't powerful enough. They told me that we just needed to mount a larger laser cannon on the standard models, and that we'd make them smarter – that we'd give them the ability to learn! Then, incidentally - and this is completely unrelated – about a hundred hyper-intelligent killer robots recently escaped from the lab and we kind of need to hunt them down and destroy them forever.

This game is a bit of a return to the style I liked from the series, with dialogue no more complicated than, “Look out! The giant robot will kill you!” and best of all, fewer pessimistic hippies trying to inform me of how tragic my personal life choices are. I play these games because I like to murder people with anthropomorphic robots, thank-you-very-much. In short, the game starts out and you're a man, or a woman, as it may stand, on a mission, and all you need to know is where the enemy is at and how the heck you pilot one of these stupid robots.

Controls

Usually I like to think about the setting of a game before going on to anything else, but I'd rather start out with the controls because they're complicated enough that you'll likely use every single button on the pad. This is fine; a lot of games do this. However, the initial control set-up has a lot of inherent flaws, and trying to use them was pretty well like trying to participate in an aerial dog fight with a bathtub hurled from a catapult. Essentially you just hurtle towards the ground in a persistently downward motion, and while you can in fact take down anyone stupid enough to fly directly into your path, any good Red Baron knows to just ignore you until your face collides with the ground at mach three.

For some reason the game designers thought that the default controls should make all your weapons controlled by the buttons next to your right analog stick, making it impossible to easily control the camera and weapons at the same time. As a result, I spent the first mission or two of the game choosing between flying in a straight line while holding the fire buttons or having only enough ample control to headbutt my enemies. I was really pretty disappointed to find that though I was the size of a house and probably weighed three times as much as one, head-on collisions only resulted in an embarrassing clanking noise followed by the swift reception of surface-to-face missiles on my part.

It wasn't until I started fiddling around with system options that I found that I could actually set my own custom controls because I'm pretty sure that the game didn't offer me the option in the beginning of the game. I might be mistaken, but I distinctly remember looking for a custom controls option when I started up; the game asked me what control setting I wanted to play with, after all. But at any rate, if you do buy this game be sure to look for custom controls before and after you start playing; otherwise you'll have all the three-dimensional maneuverability of a freight train.

Setting and Plot

Since the theme of the game means big business will one day be the death of us all, you live in a bleak and dystopian future where, for some reason, all the world's governmental bodies decided it was ok for corporate organizations to maintain standing armies and nuclear weapons.

People used to live in underground cities, but finding them too easily infiltrated by killer robots, have decided to relocate to flying cities. The cities themselves resemble a wrack of surf boards: their ability to fly somewhat lacking verisimilitude just by their looks.

The first question I have to ask myself is what people can possibly do for work in a flying city. I mean, sure, there's paper jobs; the government has a lot of war ships the size of small towns, and that kind of investment demands an insurance policy. But I'm really not sure that a flying city could produce many major exports, and I'm positive they can't have any natural resources. Besides, what about farming? Does everybody survive on hydroponic beans or something? What happens when the weather is bad?

I'm lead to believe that there are people who live on the ground, but either due to nuclear war or laziness in the developing department, there are only two backdrops for the entire game: oceans and deserts (arctic tundra is technically a desert), and they tend to be featureless. There are buildings sometimes, sure, but all of them are buried at least halfway up by either sand or water, and most of the time they're surrounded by military installations or war machines that produce massive amounts of radiation, making the drive to work extremely unfortunate.

Naturally, making this drive to work every day is you! The grizzled, mercenary hero type of the game who spends his life paying loan sharks back the payments you owe on your anthropomorphic death-mobile. Although you technically belong to a company or possibly more than one company, every day is bring your own guns to work day, so you spend the early parts of the game floundering with stock weaponry.

There are three possible plot lines to the game, but the differences only last for two or three missions at most – just the tail end of the game. You can either choose to work for or fight a rebellion group called “Orca,” or you can decide to heck with that and shoot down the flying surfboards. If you work for or against Orca then the game will pit you on either sides of a couple battles, but the final resulting battle is generally the same.

Up until you can choose to follow the differentiating three paths, nothing really seems to be going on. Mostly they send you on missions to fight ridiculously enormous war machines that are actually far more ineffectual than they appear. Other times you just bumble around the desert, shooting anything that flashes red on your radar from potentially a safe distance of one thousand miles away.

When it comes time to make the choices, the only plot line really worth mentioning is the one that aides the “Orca” group, who sadly never once instructs you to kill seals or save any whales. Instead, they clearly indicate how evil they are by painting all their robots black or silver and by forcing you to watch all your mission briefings in front of black and white footage of the Orca banner. As they do this, they snidely spell out your mission goals, point out how all the damage is necessary to save the world, and then set you loose to fight for everlasting peace.

Somehow all the noise they make has something to do with shooting down satellites so that they can journey into space and colonize the stars, but it's really not all that important. The group dies off completely and without exposition – down to the very last member – in roughly two or maybe three missions. Afterwards, the group leader, who apparently KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN ALL ALONG, sends you a pre-recorded message telling you that you're in charge now. Go figure: your leader had the foresight to know absolutely everyone but you would be killed, and yet he still lacked the presence of mind to change his plans to ones that were less immediately suicidal for everyone.

Gameplay

Since the game's plot is so lousy it could have easily been drummed up by an attention-deficit seven year old on crack cocaine, the gameplay is this game's most outstanding feature. However, this is completely unfortunate, because the game's quick pace does a lot to muddle my ability to take control of what I'm actually doing.

For example, any robot on your level can fly at outrageous speeds, making them difficult to track at distances you can see them from. Compounding the problem is your own constant need to take evasive action non-stop throughout the fighting, making the entirety of every mission a lot like trying to chase down a house fly while keeping your balance on a tilt-o-whirl.

The game knows this, so it quite responsibly solves the problem by giving you an inboard targeting computer that does all the hard work for you. Yet therein lays the problem: because you couldn't possibly do it on your own, the game does all the important aiming without you and the entire difficulty of the game just revolves around keeping the enemy on your screen for more than two seconds.

It didn't take long for me to figure out that the best way to approach this difficulty was to increase the distance between myself and the enemy. The further away they were in my vision, the further distance the enemy had to travel to go off-screen. As a result, my arsenal switched to exclusively long range weapons, and I designed a robot that could stay in flight perpetually. There was not a single enemy that could stand up to this approach, and furthermore, there were not five enemies at once that could stand up to this approach either. All I had to do was nonchalantly rain death from the heavens at a distance too great for any other weapons to realistically cover, and virtually every mission in this game was wrapped up.

My biggest problem with this is that it prevented me from having any knowledge of what I was fighting. Most of the time anything smaller than a sky scraper was just a blip on the radar or a smudge streaking across the screen, and it lead to me feeling confused any time another robot acted as if it knew me. “It figures that I should be the one to kill you,” does it, gray dot two thousand miles below me? Yeah it figures. I kill hundreds of gray dots! Who the heck are you supposed to be?

Don't get me wrong. When it happened maneuvering was fairly engaging. Not to mention that sniping positively every enemy to death without ever being in harm's way isn't mandatory – it's just practical. But frankly I think a flight simulator may have served me better, and at the pace this game is playing I think it would have actually been better served to be in a flight simulator format. It would have taken the guesswork out of forward momentum and would have freed up button use and brain space for more delicate maneuvers.

Final Recommendation

When I think about how I would recommend this game, an image conjures to mind of a scene I once saw in a Godzilla movie. At one point during a Godzilla attack, the camera crew decided to just superimpose Godzilla over a film of Tokyo city traffic going about its regular business. The result was a hilarious scene in which people were very carelessly driving towards Godzilla without giving any indication of concern. A bus schedule is a bus schedule, I guess.

My only explanation is that the people of Japan must know that driving towards Godzilla does not necessarily mean certain death. Rather, driving towards Godzilla merely means an increased probability of certain death. After all, Godzilla isn't a bad guy in every movie, and if he does crush you it may be entirely by accident. Similarly, this game isn't really bad, per se, but if you buy it without renting first you will definitely be increasing your probability of being crushed by Godzilla.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/09/08

Game Release: Armored Core: For Answer (US, 09/16/08)