Astute readers will know how excited I was to have the chance to run around fighting with giant robots, and how disappointed I was to find that the 360 version of Virtual On failed to deliver on several levels. The gameplay was bland and repetitive in the same way Street Fighter is, but lacked the multiplayer aspect that compensates for that fact, the controls felt like you were driving a brick with rocket engines glued to it where you could zoom around the map at face flapping speed but turning round felt like you were walking through treacle. It had potential to be amazing, and it wasn’t like anything else would ever try to improve on such an unusual concept…
Or is there?
Meet Armored Core, a game where you build your own giant robot and rocket around levels firing unhealthy amounts of missiles at enemies or slicing them with a laser sword if that takes your fancy.
What could possibly go wrong?
The story is the annoyingly prevalent “The future is unpleasant so everyone’s fighting each other” template where the world has become so damaged by pollution that corporations do battle over the planet’s increasingly scarce resources with giant robots, as the player you pick a side and then just start fighting everyone regardless of who you chose. I know with videogames it’s the mechanics that take precedence over the story, and maybe I’ve been spoilt by the Ace Combat series that combined similar jet fighter action with complex, epic storylines (even if the last one was a bit stupid), but this just feels so cheap. You have no reason to be fighting other than for its own sake and that serves to only feed my second biggest gripe with this game.
You will spend about half your time in the menu screens poring over the different parts you can install on your robot weighing up the pros and cons of more armour or greater mobility and trying to work out what all the other numbers mean. It manages to run the gamut between fascinating and dull as all hell depending on how much you 
think you know what you’re doing at the time. The rest of the time you will be piloting your lovely machine, and while the mecha themselves are rendered in lavish detail, everything else looks like absolute arse. The levels are barren and hideously rendered, which frees the console to make them huge and destructible. It’s a fair trade when if a building is in your way, you can just destroy it with a push of a button, and you should be too busy zooming around destroying stuff to care, but if you stand still it’s just shocking. The levels themselves try their best to be different from each other, bless their little cotton socks, but there are only so many variations on the ‘fly around and kill stuff’ setup you can really do. Ace Combat dealt with this by making you care about the people in your planes and even your enemies. Armored core just falls flat on its big metal face.
Recent instalments have offered online play as well, allowing players to pitch their creations against each other. Unfortunately, hardly anyone’s online with it at the moment. So unless you know someone else with the game, or you wait for Armored Core 5, you’re not going to have much luck. On the other hand, there is a split screen multiplayer, allowing you to beat the crap out of each other with giant robots of your own creation, which is a lot of fun if you take the time to make a nice selection of robots to play with.
The interesting thing about this game is that it swings back and forth between amazing and mediocre, sometimes within the same sentence. While it feels a little empty and unfulfilling some times, at other times you get to take on giant walking aircraft carriers by yourself. Armored Core 4 and the latest version Armored Core: For Answer are knocking around in game shops for anywhere between eight and fifteen quid and for that price it’s certainly worth a look. For all its gripes I’m still itching to play it again every half an hour purely to watch the pretty patterns my missiles make when I fire them all at the poor sod that had the misfortune to try to attack me from the air.
An Armored Core 5 has been announced with an unspecified release date, we’ll see if they give any good details at E3 this June, and when they release it I’ll certainly let you know if it’s any good.
