The Armored Core series has been around for a while now and has a hardcore following of aficionados, but after ten years have they learnt anything that might endear the series more to the average gamer?

One thing that struck me from the start was the sheer lack of information you’re given as a gamer and if you’re not a veteran of the AC series (which I’m not) then you’ll have a hard time getting into the next-gen offering. The plot is as vague as a stage psychic and reams of back-story are stuffed down the player’s throats without even an explanation. You’re apparently a mercenary Mecha pilot who goes all over the country fighting skirmishes for the right price. But each mission feels completely detached from the next; the story never establishes your character and is scant with any of the peripheral characters, so you never really engage with the story at all.

At the beginning you’re given quite a choice of basic mecha combinations to choose from, depending on your playing style: you could be a lightweight close-combat mecha armed with assault rifles and laser swords or a Big-Bertha of the future with bazookas for arms! As you complete missions you can use the credits to customise your mecha with essentials such as new weapons, boosters, armour and body parts, as well as the opportunity to paint it to your heart’s content.

The customisation is completely fine for gamers who have used it before but for the uninitiated it’s an absolutely awful system. For starters you have goodness knows how many tutorials on how to turn around and fire your weapon (the easiest bit of the game) but not a single tutorial on how to make a new mecha, or what all the numbers mean. When you change a part you can equip it without even having the money to afford it, and then the game makes it impossible to find the original part that you actually owned! I could go on, but let’s just say the system isn’t very user-friendly for such a complex and intricate part of the game, and also a part at which AC games usually shine.

In-game nothing is much better. The graphics, aside from a few nice touches, like the booster effects, are very bland and blocky. The environments are mostly bare and the game makes lots of excuses to explain why you can’t see five feet in front of you, but we’re not having any of it. The arenas are also so small that on several occasions I’ve boosted around a building to flank it, or boosted over something only to fail the mission because I’d gone out the ‘mission area’. And there’s no restart option so you have to sit through the (unskippable) briefings every time you fail - arrrgh.

The mecha move well, with good feelings of weight and momentum and if you swap a pair of legs out or bulk up with heavier armour and big guns you can feel it. Although the control setup feels a lot more intuitive than ACs of the past, one big problem with them is the targeting system, which needs to be looked at. It targets any enemy in front of you and you can click the left analogue stick in to ‘lock on’, and you get a nice CCTV-like picture of your target up. But for some strange reason, whether you’ve clicked the stick in or not the reticule will randomly switch between targets as your walking around, and even when you’re not moving if they are! There’s no way to manually switch between targets, or actually lock on. This becomes a problem when you have to destroy certain targets only, or when you’re being pounded by artillery and you can stop flickering between two little tanks in front of you.

After ten years you’d think the developers would have worked out how to give us attention to detail without bogging the gamer down with technical specs and complicated controls. But who says developers ever learn? Look at the Dynasty Warriors series…