Reviewed: October 18, 2008
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud
Publisher
Ubisoft
Developer
FromSoftware
Released: September 16, 2008
Genre: Action
Players: 1
Online: 2-8
5
6
6
5
5.5
Supported Features:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Armored Core: For Answer may have been a great mech fight but the game lacks any cohesive gameplay or actual strategy in those big lumbering suits. The Armored Core of so many previous games may have been good but these days more than just fancy mechanical suits are needed to make a good game.
Take Mech Warrior and throw in some great looking Heavy Gears with the neat skating movements and you have a good basis for Armored Core: For Answers. But you would be missing a few important parts to the game like gameplay; there is very little use for all that heavy weaponry with a great selection if you don’t get the chance to use any of it.
Armored Core: For Answer may be in a long line of previous hits but having not played any of them I wouldn’t know how this one compared. I do know For Answer does have a great choice of weapons and a great robot building section but the actual fighting is lame. You get all the neat weapons in great variety, load up your Armored Core suit and run through missions simply pressing the fire buttons and zipping around trying to not get hit by enemy fire.
That about sums up every mission in Armored Core: For Answer, button mashing shooting and side stepping to and fro to be missed by their random shooting. The targeting system works great, in fact it does all the work for you and all you have to do is keep firing until the targeting moves to the next enemy.
From one mission to the next you simply upgrade to the best and most damage inflicting weapons and head out to the next foray. You may run out of ammo often but at least you will deal out the most damage but this ends up being a tiresome way of winning your fights.
There really is very little strategy or tactics, which is a great shame; this could have been a great game with a little less automation and a little more randomness. The games enemies and AI do not do much of anything other than run toward you shooting; or float, fly and speed as the vessel may be powered.
The scenes you fight in can be boiled down to flat landscapes or seascapes and convoluted cityscapes inside large structures but lacking any real terrain. You mostly move through each scene shooting and blowing away everything else until you finish off your objectives.
Some of the enemies will be more worthy of your talents as a mech fighter but mostly all you do is pull the trigger until no more enemies come at you. Some of the more difficult enemies tend to do the same thing, shoot until you go down because their weapons may be a bit bigger.
This makes them a bit tougher and you just need to find the appropriate tactic to use to defeat them, which usually means finding its weak spot. There is a coop mode as well as multiplayer but it would seem not many are actually playing the game online.
Finding the weak spot or appropriate strategy does not make for a good game when the only shooting tactic means pulling the trigger all the time. There are various weapons but I could not really find much difference in them other than how much damage they dole out.
You can select from a wide variety of weapons but the selection boils down to the mission and what you are gunning for but some of weapons just don’t work. The sniper rifle was my pet peeve; you can’t really look through a scope and hit the enemy in a vital area so why bother with it.
All the targeting is done through the automated system and all you have the chance to do is either shoot the one in the target or jump to another target if you want. Some of the missions are timed but others are just a matter of bringing enough ammo to finish the job. You can use free aiming but this does not work well, it is just too hard to shoot and hit anything in a third person view with everything else flitting around so fast.
The multiplayer is fighting either one on one or teams but it is basically the same quick fighting with your AC suits and automatic targeting. Having a better equipped suit will make most of the difference but also being more used to the controls and a quicker shot will help.
The main problem I found with the game is there is a decided lack of control on the player’s part for shooting which detracts from the game. I really do not like how you have so little control about your shooting in the game whether multiplayer or single player.
In what could only be described as muted and very bland colors for Armored Core the graphics are dull and very lackluster for most everything. The terrain and buildings are very smooth and undistinguishable from one another giving all the scenes a common and uninteresting background for your fighting.
The textures are not varied much at all and when you encounter buildings whether from the inside or out they are pretty much all alike, brand new with no damage until you drop them with explosions. The inside scenes are about the same while the water effects look like your skating on Vaseline, as one website review put it and I think it’s a good description as well.
The graphical effects and things like rocket blasts as seen from the back of your AC are well done and I truly enjoyed the opening scene when you first turn the game on. In fact that is the best part of the game; you have this huge Armored Core that is getting ready for takeoff with the various prelaunch stuff going on.
After the AC launches it goes through some maneuvers and launches a few weapons all in a great looking and cinematic scene that would make for a great start to a movie. The graphics were very muted and the game just did not stand out in many ways to me for any parts.
The effects are nothing spectacular and even muted for the most part but they are pretty decent and don’t slow the game down. That was one thing I did notice with so much happening and you shooting at everything that moves the game still chugs along without skipping or lower frame rates.
The sound worked well and everything sounded good enough but nothing really stood out here one way or the other, everything worked but there were no pauses to just listen to things that are that good. The theme music and voices were okay and did not detract from the gaming experience but they did not really stand out either.
The sound effects were a bit low for the scale of what was going on but they did all right and did not take away from the game at all. They just did not add to it with any of the audio that stood out other than the opening scene, which was great.
While this game has a great section for customizing your Armored Core there’s just that there is not much to do with it after you have installed all the various weapons and features, painted and applied decals and balanced out everything. I find it odd to spend so much of the game on customizing your mech to only run through missions that take less than five minutes to play, even in multiplayer it will be over pretty quickly. The customizing of the AC mechs go from which weapons and parts to put on the suits, the paint job and decals as well as trimming and customizing all the parts.
You even have a section on balancing out the weight for both skating and flying so your suit is optimized to fight; this makes little sense to me. It’s nice to have the options for so much but if you don’t use it what’s the point, I guess that is the biggest thing about this game what’s missing instead of what’s there.
Armored Core: For Answer, bad translation from Japanese, is an average game and if you’re an Armored Core fan you will probably want to play it, if for nothing else than the opening scene and the chance to customize the dickens out of your AC.
Armored Core: For Answer could have been a great game with a bit more terrain variations or something that added to the gameplay, but this is not the best mech game out there and your should probably rent instead of buying.