Armored Core 4

Armored Core 4 was the first in the Armored Core series to be released on the PlayStation 3 in December 2006, mere months after the console’s official launch. It is not a series I am familiar with at all, I have played a handful of hours in other mech type shooters but this entire genre is not one that I usually play. I can tell there is a niche for these games and I can see the depth in them that the community must enjoy and that specialisation is quite noticeable in the review scores. The average review score is quite mixed, hovering in the 60s but if you dig into the individual scores it’s more polarised, some people love it and some people don’t like it at all.

When you first start the game you are dropped into a fairly boring set of tutorials set in virtual reality space where you learn to move your mech around, fire weapons and learn about the couple of different speed boost mechanics, it was not clearly explained to me why there were 3 different boot mechanics and how to best make use of them - that you must figure out on your own later. I would discover that mastery of these controls is absolutely key to getting through this game. Being able to confidently control your mech, move with speed, target and shoot is one half of the central challenge of the game. I really enjoyed having 3 different shoot buttons, you have your left arm weapon, right arm weapon and shoulder weapon, plus buttons to cycle between weapons on the arms too. Instead of a GUI which tells you which weapon you have engaged, you have to rely on looking at the physical mech in-game, where the animation changes when you cycle your weapons.

The first few levels were very short and proved no difficulty for me. You are dropped into a city or a facility in your mech and then you shoot and destroy a bunch of other mechs and leave with a rank score and a bunch of gold coins in my pocket.

In one early mission my task was to protect a warehouse from a group of mechs, in protecting the warehouse I also shot and blasted it to bits, destroying crates, walls and other presumably important machinery. Nevertheless I completed the mission with an A rank but I did notice that you are deducted money based on the amount of damage you do. This becomes important fairly quickly as in a subsequent mission I did so much damage that when I got the reward for completing the mission the balance was negative and the game offers you the option of redoing the mission or accepting the loss so you can at least continue.

The spike in difficulty was sudden and early on, I checked the front cover of the box and discovered it was developed by FromSoftware and not only that but its director was Hidetaka Miyazaki, the man who would later go on to direct the many, many Dark Souls games and spin-offs. Fans of those games probably already knew that he had done Armored Core but this was news to me and suddenly the games made a lot of sense. I felt like a game historian, going back to a famous video game designer’s earlier work to discover the tropes that existed way back when.

Armored Core 4’s short missions are intentional. They are short challenges designed to get you to master a particular skill. You can die very quickly, but you can also destroy very quickly. I died 4 times on one mission before on the fifth attempt I beat it in about 30 seconds. You need to master the controls, as I have mentioned, but you also need to master setting up your mech.

In between missions you can customize your mech and the options here are extremely overwhelming, not too dissimilar to upgrading the stats in your characters in Dark Souls. Changing parts of your mech affects the weight, the cost, the balance and it is very much not treated as an upgrade but more like a load-out. You need to pick the right set up for the right mission type and the game presents these rather fittingly as Schematics.

Unfortunately though the age of the PlayStation 3 does not really suit this style of gameplay any more. Every time you fail a short mission, which is often, you have to load back into the menu and every time you retry you have to load again. The load times on PlayStation 3 feel slow by modern standards and you can just about get away with it on some games but ones that require frequent loading are more painful. The graphics are also pretty lackluster, the environments are bland and not very detailed and everything has a hazy fog to it all, it was an early PlayStation 3 title of course.

Multiplayer may have been a much bigger part of this game’s personality but unfortunately I cannot play that any more. I can imagine investing in mech set up and working with friends would have been a lot of fun.

Two more Armored Core titles were released on the PlayStation 3, Armored Core For Answer (An unusual title) is a direct sequel to Armored Core 4 and then much later on we saw Armored Core V.

This is not my sort of game and not my sort of genre. But I absolutely love that this niche exists and I can see the appeal of learning something so intricately and mastering the build of the mech. But even at that, I think the poor graphics and slow load times mean there are probably better Armored Core games out there but if nothing else, if you are a fan of Miyazaki’s games it is fascinating to look back and explore the parallels.