Mindful Mechanical Mayhem (Armored Core 2 (PS2))

Member Name: TeeCee

Product:	Armored Core 2 (PS2)
Date:	04/07/01 (82 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks good, plays well, requires a brain

Disadvantages: Sloppy User Interface design, American spelling

At last! A PS2 game that both looks good and plays well, a game with variety that requires some degree of thought.

AC2 is set on a futuristic Mars ruled by mega-corporations who are at war with each other and with Earth Gov. You are a Raven, a mercenary who sells the services of your AC to the highest bidder.

An AC? What's that? It's an "Armoured Core". Imagine a heavily armoured robot bristling with weaponry. Now imagine yourself wearing it like a suit and blasting everything that moves. Oooohhh... makes me shiver just thinking of it. It's enough to give you testosterone poisoning!

AC2 is at heart a third person shooter. You take your AC through a variety of missions (over thirty are apparently available, though you don't get to play them all). If you complete a mission successfully, you get a reward with which you can buy new and better equipment. Unfortunately you also have to pay for repairing and rearming your AC, so it is possible to complete a mission successfully and make a loss. At the beginning this is a serious problem, though by the end of the game you should have money to burn.

The graphics are great and the missions have a feeling of reality. Things react, they move properly, you get really involved. There's an occasional problem of seeing through the ceiling, but that's a rare lapse. Initially you'll be annoyed by the sluggish turning speed of your AC. That's not a game bug - there's an optional part you can buy to speed up your turn rate. I'd recommend it as an early priority.

As well as the missions, there is an "Arena" mode. This is a ladder where you can challenge increasingly powerful ACs and try to climb to the top. This provides a break from the missions (some of which are extremely difficult) and lets you experiment with new weapons and tactics. Arena mode is basically a "free lunch" in that you don't have to pay the usual rep
air and rearm charges. If you win, you get a financial reward and occasionally a new AC part. At the start of the game this is the easiest way of getting the cash that you need to upgrade your AC. If you don't play the Arena you're unlikely to get far in the missions.

I've mentioned "new parts" several times. Customisation is the real appeal of AC2. There are dozens of different parts available, some of which work together, some of which are incompatible. Needless to say the manual is totally inadequate as regards explaining them, however you can pick most of it up (there are still a few things I don't understand even now). If you just want to get out and blast things you'll find this aspect of AC2 boring. If, like me, you're a born fiddler then you'll love it. You can change everything about your AC - for a price. You want spider legs? You got 'em. Replace your arms with rocket launchers? Done. All these changes affect the visual look of your AC and since this is a third person shooter it is visible during the mission.

What makes this configuration facility really interesting is that there is no such thing as the "best" AC. Most items have pros and cons. Heavy armour means less speed. Powerful cores have less option slots. Heavy rocket launchers tend to carry less ammo. These trade offs combine with the different sorts of mission. Most are simple "shoot everything that moves"; others stress speed, conservation of ammo, etc. Different missions imply different optimal AC configurations.

All of which means that this is an attractive, exciting PS2 shooter which requires you to use your brain. It can be done!

So if it's that good, why does it only get three stars?

Well, it loses one star immediately for the incorrectly spelt name. That might seem petty, but there's an important point here. If game manufacturers are going to segment the market artificially o
n geographical grounds then at least they should respect local languages. It's bad enough that British gamers are already treated as second class citizens without having American spelling forced on us.

The other star is lost for a number of irritating problems with the user interface. For example, let's say you want to replace your weapon with a new mega-gun for which you've been saving. You have to go to the shop, go through all the "Sell" menus to sell the old one and get the cash you need. Then you have to trudge through all the "Buy" menus to get the new one. Then you have to leave the shop, go to the Garage and go through the menus to enable the new gun. Only then do you get the message that your AC is overweight! Which means you have to reverse the whole damn process. There must have been a better way of organising this. Another example: at several stages you are given a new AC part as a reward. You receive an email saying, "Have this part". It doesn't tell you *which* part it is. You then have to go through all the menus to find it. Third example: When you first press "Start" the game menu defaults to "New Game" rather than "Load". If you accidentally press this there is no way to back out; you have to go through the whole AC creation process and the first mission before you get the chance to do a load (it's much quicker to press the reset button). These and other misfeatures are intensely annoying and could have been fixed extremely easily.

So, AC2 is a great game. What a shame it's let down by some really sloppy User Interface design and US linguistic imperialism.

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