Got bodied hard by the one-two punch of The Last Raven and Silent Line, so I opted to start somewhere I wouldn’t get my teeth kicked in from mission one- and while I think this is a pretty unremarkable title overall, it further cements my admiration of Armored Core as one of the premier cheapskate simulators on the market. HotPocketHPE already articulated this better than I can in his review of AC1, but you are constantly weighing your resources against each other to stay ahead the growing pile of fees that come with your work.
You can see this in the way the melee attack works, which doesn’t cost any ammo to use, but almost always guarantees you’ll add to the repair fees at the end of a mission, as you have to expose yourself to enemy fire while trying to close distance with them. What should be your coolest move always feeling a little like an admission that you’ve messed up- that somewhere you miscalculated and so had to resort to this.
And maybe more than any other bit of design, I think the thing that vindicates the economy is that it sometimes feels like it’s the best option to fail a tough mission early on, take whatever the financial hit is, and see if there are any new contracts that might be a little easier and cost-effective to take on- I don’t know if many titles have made me so rethink my definition success and failure so often as this. It’s a game where you’ll eke out a win, breathe a sigh of relief, and then find out you still lost when you’re staring down a results screen that says you spent more than you made when you factor in the cost of repairs and ammo.
(This is to say nothing of the Consorts you can hire to come along with you on certain missions, which almost always ended up with me grimly sorting through them to find the meatshield with the most survivability- but that would still let me keep some of the extra earnings for myself. Pour one out for “gun duct-taped to a roomba,” you went above and beyond.)
Otherwise, mission design is a little weak, and I’m starting to feel a trend that the front half of these games is kind of a slog, with lots of short missions that don’t have a huge amount of intrigue: Corporations test the waters against each other and you fight way through another set of MT’s at the end of a dark hallway. By the time it finishes, you can at least see it setting the stage for better things to come, while not necessarily being the most thrilling on its own- though I do like the way the action resolves in its finale.
Fitting that for all the warfare and sabotage going on between the corporations, they’re united in their fundamental belief of the status quo: their world may be dying, but anything else is unimaginable.
Tear it all down and let the new one in.
You can see this in the way the melee attack works, which doesn’t cost any ammo to use, but almost always guarantees you’ll add to the repair fees at the end of a mission, as you have to expose yourself to enemy fire while trying to close distance with them. What should be your coolest move always feeling a little like an admission that you’ve messed up- that somewhere you miscalculated and so had to resort to this.
And maybe more than any other bit of design, I think the thing that vindicates the economy is that it sometimes feels like it’s the best option to fail a tough mission early on, take whatever the financial hit is, and see if there are any new contracts that might be a little easier and cost-effective to take on- I don’t know if many titles have made me so rethink my definition success and failure so often as this. It’s a game where you’ll eke out a win, breathe a sigh of relief, and then find out you still lost when you’re staring down a results screen that says you spent more than you made when you factor in the cost of repairs and ammo.
(This is to say nothing of the Consorts you can hire to come along with you on certain missions, which almost always ended up with me grimly sorting through them to find the meatshield with the most survivability- but that would still let me keep some of the extra earnings for myself. Pour one out for “gun duct-taped to a roomba,” you went above and beyond.)
Otherwise, mission design is a little weak, and I’m starting to feel a trend that the front half of these games is kind of a slog, with lots of short missions that don’t have a huge amount of intrigue: Corporations test the waters against each other and you fight way through another set of MT’s at the end of a dark hallway. By the time it finishes, you can at least see it setting the stage for better things to come, while not necessarily being the most thrilling on its own- though I do like the way the action resolves in its finale.
Fitting that for all the warfare and sabotage going on between the corporations, they’re united in their fundamental belief of the status quo: their world may be dying, but anything else is unimaginable.
Tear it all down and let the new one in.
2 Comments
Will give that a try!
xaerock
1 year ago