Armored Core Review

The garage is the game. Choosing a core, legs, generator and boosters that balance weight against energy drain, then discovering in a corridor that your build cannot turn fast enough to track a hovering enemy, is the loop, and everything in the missions exists to give that loop consequences. It is a genuine simulation attitude in a genre that mostly wanted power fantasy. The corporate war fiction is delivered by radio chatter and mission briefings that never explain themselves, which is the studio's voice already fully formed.

Playing it now is difficult. The original control scheme predates dual analogue and asks you to strafe and look with shoulder buttons, which is as awkward as it sounds. Missions charge you for ammunition and repairs regardless of outcome, so a bad run can push an account into debt and, in the worst case, leave a player unable to afford the parts required to progress. The environments are brown boxes.