Armored Core 4

Serving as a reboot for the series, Armored Core 4 is a badass mech game that is a little easier to get into than past entries in the series. I rented the original game back in the day and loved it and became a huge fan. To be honest with you, pretty much any game that lets you, pilot, a mech is going to at the very least get me to give it a try. As I write this review, we just got a trailer for the upcoming sixth game in the series so I thought I would dust off the old 360 and fire this up to see how well it holds up.

Fighting For Freedom

Armored Core 4 has a pretty decent sci-fi action movie style of story that I found to be a lot of fun. We play as a Lynx which is a pilot for this badass mech that is used to get involved in these conflicts that take place between the various corporations that rule the world. It is not going to win any awards for its storytelling or anything like that, but I still had fun with it. I especially liked the relationship between our character and their handler/operator Fiona.

Quick On The Draw!

Even though I was a fan of the past games, I will fully admit that they had a fairly steep learning curve. With Armored Core 4 they wanted to make it more accessible and I feel that they achieved it. At the time, this was the fasted paced game in the series and it was much easier to get into than the past games…. However, there is still a learning curve here and the controls do take a bit of getting used to so do not come into this expecting an arcade style pick up and play mech game.

Power Extreme!

A huge part of the reason as to why I am many other people love these games so much is the customization. The level of detail that you can get into with each piece is truly amazing stuff and probably where you will spend a great deal of your time if you get hooked on this game. The mission structure is pretty basic, you tend to go to an area and have to kill other mechs, usually with some kind of mission objective or parameter added to the battle to try and keep things interesting. It is pretty challenging and you do not have to complete all of the missions to move on to the next chapter which I am sure some people will like.

Cheesy, But Cool

As well as making things more “streamlined” for new players. Another thing that Armored Core 4 was bringing to the table was better visuals. Even though the graphics are nothing to cheer about today, I do think that they hold up pretty well. Some of the effects from the various weapons still look great and I think that the cutscenes are cheesy, especially with the voice acting, but I mean cheesy in a good way. It looks very typical of an Xbox 360 game that was released during this era, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Pros:

• I got a kick out of the cheesy sci-fi story being told
• I liked how the game was faster-paced
• The level of mech customization is crazy and a lot of fun
• There were some neat multiplayer modes

Cons:

• Sadly, those multiplayer servers are long dead on Xbox 360
• The game still does have a bit of a learning curve for new players