Overview:

You like big robots who skate around and are on missions to take out other robots?  Well then have I got a game for you.  The first in the Armored Core franchise, Armored Core is as simple as it gets.  You take control of your robot [Armored Core] who you can customize with parts you find throughout the missions.  The possibilities seem kind of endless with it really depending on how you want to play.  You are given a selection of missions to choose from to help you progress through the story.  In hindsight, the series hasn’t really changed much in the 25 years from 1 to 6.

Visuals:

I gotta say, I’m kind of impressed with how the game looks.  Granted it’s pretty rudimentary and the black fog of war is always present, though not claustrophobic.  The character models look sharp with the enemies having enough variety to give you the ability to change your playstyle depending on what you’re up against.  The environments change enough and are pretty open which force you to go looking for trouble in every nook and cranny.  The weakpoint, if anything, is the out of mission UI which just gives you a little wheel to answer emails, accept contracts, or change your AC.  The amount of customization for your AC is pretty impressive in so much that you can kind of create whatever you want.  Pretty neat!

Audio:

This is such a mood swing in this department.  The sound effects are all kind of par for the course with the usual explosions and gunfire being ho hum.  Where it really kicks off is the soundtrack.  It hits that late 1990s early 2000s techno sound that everything was wanting to emulate.  Mind you this was 2 years before the release of the Matrix so it wasn’t super saturated yet but I do love hearing it.  

Completion:

I didn’t play much of this game because I know the amount of customization you can put into these games and I didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole.  I became a Raven by passing the test, so yay me!  I then completed my first mission of eliminating some squatters from a blocky open world with some severe black fog.  The game controlled well and I dig how it looks.  The only thing I didn’t really like was how it controlled with it being kind of a slog to turn and look up or down.  These would be fixed in the later entries, but we work with what we got!