fter a long and illustrious run on the Sony PlayStation and PlayStation 2, the popular giant-robot combat series returns once more, this time shorn of story and honed for pure arena-style brawling. Stripped of a campaign mode and even individual missions, Armored Core: Nine Breaker is about no-frills building, training and tweaking out a monster metal rig, then taking it into gladiator-style duels to earn points and advance to the arena's top ranked spot.
Armored Core: Nine Breaker is built around three activities: the garage, the training system and the arena. In the garage, players can view and customize their robots by selecting different mods in structural areas such as the head, torso, legs, etc. Each part has attributes that modify weight, energy consumption, heat generation and other variables that, in turn, affect a robot's armor rating, movement speed and overall performance in combat. As usual, tank-style robots can take and dish out heavy-duty punishment but are easy targets for lighter, faster robots, and vice versa. The essentials of tactical engagement are thus premised on a complex "paper-rock-scissors" system of technology compromises tailored to individual play styles, e.g., nimble featherweights vs. sluggish juggernauts.
At the outset there are just the basic weapon mods available in the garage, but as players complete training missions (there are more than 100) and duel successfully in the arena, better mods are unlocked. Training is a game all its own, with incrementally challenging areas in categories such as attack, defense and movement. Bronze, silver and gold medals are awarded constituent upon the time taken to complete a course. Occasionally the game will offer "unranked" arena matches, which give players a chance to advance through the lower-lettered ranks and into the upper echelon of the "top 30" elite. The end goal is to climb the final 30-slot ladder by battling ranked robots to become the top player in the game.
The garage runs in a standalone menu system and additionally allows players to turn on or off cockpit displays, paint their robots and weapons, and even customize emblems which can be saved to a memory card. In both training mode and the arena, the designated robot is controlled using the left analog stick to move and the right analog stick to look and aim. The right and left trigger buttons are used to fire weapons, open doors, activate rocket boosters (allowing the robot to jump or fly short distances) and trigger "inside" weapons—special offensive or defensive mods such as mines and decoy dispensers. There is no online multiplayer, but the game supports hot-seat two-to-four-player split-screen combat, as well as single-screen combat with direct-linked systems or a local area network/Ethernet connection.
Lean, mean and lackluster
There's something about hulking metal monsters and tweaked-out mod stores that's never translated well to the twitch-click video-game paradigm. Pitting robots with dozens of weapons and strike zones against each other is something best done on paper, which, to date, far better captures the grand "battleship" feel that jamming on a button in real-time has always missed. The Armored Core series tempers that weakness by incorporating multistructured missions that depend as much upon matching robot mods to mission requirements as on winning the occasional 20-second cannon-slinging brawl that invariably occurs.
Armored Core: Nine Breaker is thus something of an anomaly, focused squarely on the one aspect of the genre—combat—that translates least well to the button-mashing paradigm. Training mode is amusing at first, with its predictable running gantlets and "clay-pigeon" shooting ranges, but there's little variation—just higher walls to leap or faster-moving objects to shoot down. The garage is, as usual, interesting to sandbox in for a while, though gamers new to the series will be lost in jargon and numbers that lack contextual explanations, in or out of the game (the manual is terrible, offering menu descriptions only).
Arena combat is the big sinker, however. The robot AI is just plain bad and varies erratically and inexplicably from battle to battle. A "class C" robot may, for instance, pose an insurmountable challenge in a test match, while a "class A" (notably higher-skilled) robot of comparable design will fold in a matter of seconds against the exact same player-built rig. It's as if there's a random AI generator running amok, darting from "dumb" to "overpowered" with little regard for tactical subtlety. The arenas themselves are simply medium-sized "squares" with zero tactically intriguing objects whatsoever—combat is two blips squared off at either end of the square, hurling missiles and laser fire at each other until one or the other's armor drops to zero.
Console games like Armored Core work well inside story- or mission-based strictures but fall apart as dedicated combat simulators. Looking past the tedious graphics, cryptic customization system, annoying techno-pop soundtrack and battles that end in under 30 seconds, this is still an experience for devotees only, and even then it's going to take fanboy-level enthusiasm to get much out of it.
Scaled against its predecessors, Armored Core: Nine Breaker is scraping the bottom of the barrel—this is the low-water mark for the series. Hopefully the next (next-gen) title will get things back on track with a decent campaign system and improved mod explanations.
—Matt
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