Armored Core: Nine Breaker

The Armored Core series of games is incredibly popular in Japan. Then again, what isn’t’ In the west, the franchise hasn’t really carved out any massive following, despite the games being released by a multitude of different publishers. 505 Gamestreet are the latest to take a turn, and thus we have Armored Core: Nine Breaker.

Difficult to categorise, Armored Core has always been about building the biggest, toughest and most destructive mech that you can, then taking it through a story or mission mode, whilst having a go at some head-to-head battles when you fancy a change. Nine Breaker is much the same, without the story mode. And this is where things get a bit ugly. You see, the entire game could now be described as some sort of giant Pok’mon-’em-up. You build, you battle, you build and then you battle. In between, you’ll sometimes have a crack at one of the multitude of training missions that are available for play, but aside from that ‘ there’s nothing else to do.

Sure, you can take your creation into a multiplayer game (system link or splitscreen ‘ no online play here), or you can fiddle about and paint your mech a different colour, but there just isn’t enough here to warrant any sort of major investment of your time. Graphically, nothing much has improved since the first PS2 iteration of the series, and despite the amount of arenas on offer in which to do combat, none of them are anything more than functional at best.

Should you be grabbed by the customisation options and have the will to strive to build a better bot, then you’ll be in heaven with the sheer wealth of changeable parts on offer. Weapons, boosters, radiators, heads, rocket launchers, EMPs, radars and more are on offer here, and finding the right combination of items (and keeping the machine under the weight limit) is as rewarding as you could expect it to be. The only problem is that once you’ve spent a few hours tweaking, twiddling and swapping out parts, all you can realistically do is take on a CPU opponent. Time and time again. Until you decide to stop playing, or until your fingers drop off.

With that in mind, the CPU AI needed to be top drawer to provide any sort of longevity to Nine Breaker players. Oops. The ball has been well and truly dropped there, then, since the CPU seems to only have two modes of attack. If it has decent long range missiles, it’ll stay a mile away and fire volley after volley at you, and if it’s better at close range combat, it’ll use boosters to get right next to you so that it can unleash some mechanical doom. When this happens, you’d think that using your boosters to get away and reassess your position would be a good idea ‘ but it isn’t going to happen, since whatever you do, the CPU AI knows before you do where you’ll end up. Believe me, this is more frustrating than challenging, especially when you’ve just pulled off three perfectly executed evasive ninety degree turns, and found that right in front of you as you land, is the opposing bot, with metallic fists ready to pound you into next week.