Armored Core 5 is one of those very divisive entries in a franchise that feature some major shakeup that leads a sort of generalization that fans who didn't like it are in one way or another unfairly biased, or resistant to change.
Well, despite the insane marathon of the series I've been doing I've been an AC fan for all of three months. I have no deep-seated ideas about what the series is allowed to be. I've liked every other generation, which means I've liked some very different visions of the series. I knew this game's reputation going in. I did my research. I really, actively, wholeheartedly wanted to like it. I am not afraid of change, I like games with slow-paced tactical action, I think walljumps are cool. Not one of the stereotypical Bad Reasons not to like Armored Core 5 apply to me.
Mothers and fuckers of the jury, I assure you: there are plenty of good reasons not to like Armored Core 5. (You... you might want to settle in. I'm the kind of asshole who can talk for a lot longer about a game I hate than one I like.)
Well, mainly there's one or two really inescapably massive ones, but there are plenty of more basic areas where the game is just straightforwardly not good even at what it specifically wants to do. Let's start with one of the big problems, because it's extremely obvious and ties in to a lot of the smaller ones:
This is a heavily, heavily (online, no split-screen) multiplayer-focused game with long dead servers. I'm given to understand it's still possible to arrange a basic versus match with a P2P connection, but most game modes are no longer possible to play in any capacity.
And to be honest, I would absolutely categorically not be here for a mainly multiplayer experience even if that experience still existed, but that's not, like, a Bad thing about the game, that would be a matter of taste. There is a story campaign, which you used to be able to play co-op, and I'm not the type to begrudge a game for being a little short. I was fine with just blowing through the story and moving on. In theory.
It's not a good campaign. The plot is maybe the thinnest in the series outside of the games that literally don't have one, and I know that's saying a lot. It does have some decent banter with a persistent main cast of characters, but bantering between giving you orders is about all they're there to do.
More importantly, the mission design is mediocre at its very best. They're a small number of very long missions with a lot of updates to your objectives as you go, which sounds like the kind of thing that would make them really involved and memorable, but the thing is the objectives are almost always "go here and fight stuff on the way" and they take place on what are clearly multiplayer maps. The game doesn't have a ton of those; even in its grand total of ten missions, there are several outright repeats. And frankly I can't really tell how many maps there are because most of them are just different segments of the same big city area, which are just about distinct enough to be able to tell that they're not the same map but still basically mean the terrain is There's Some Buildings.
That's purposeful; the core gameplay requires a lot of cover and you can only gain any real altitude by jumping off walls, so there's a big focus on urban combat. That doesn't actually make it fun level design; everything looks the fucking same. It would be the absolute worst kind of level to try to navigate, but navigation is not a major concern because the game gives you aDetective Scan Mode. Scan Mode displays not just an objective marker but an entire routed path towards it... which just means the huge areas are functionally decoration on a set of Shooter Corridors. Admittedly the whole series can be big on corridors, but at least in other games you sometimes have to actually search them, or get aesthetics on them beside City Streets and Sewer Tunnels Under City Streets.
Technically there are also a huge number of Order Missions, which are sort of non-story mini-missions you can also play solo, but I did about 30 of these and they're pretty firmly Nothing. Like, "destroy all enemies (there are four of them and they're just completely normal enemies)" material. These also just take place on the same small handful of maps, but the enemies tend to be concentrated in a pretty small area. A few of the Order Missions are AC duels and take the place of the game having an Arena; you can hunt down which ones those are and cherry pick them if you really want, but otherwise, the Order Missions are about as egregiously Filler as any content in an Armored Core game. Don't bother.
The Tactical Combat might have been a less empty promise when the game had multiplayer, but in the campaign it's a joke. What Tactics means is that aside from a smattering of big bosses and AC minibosses, there are four or five types of enemies in the game, and they each have one extremely specific behavior and one or two equally specific hard counters. Snipers? The laser sights are visible at all times, trace them back to the source and shoot them. They will not move unless you stand fully on their perch with them for like ten seconds. Big slow shield guys? Go around them or switch to your sword to smash the shield. The little flying fuckers? Groan in annoyed misery and shoot them when they decide to come near you. The other little flying fuckers, who try to suicide bomb you? This is strictly easier than the first kind because they always come near you. Good tactical combat feels kind of like solving a puzzle, but the puzzle in AC5's story missions is designed to teach basic shapes to toddlers. It's technically more methodical than the more action-based combat of other Armored Core games, but just enough so to call attention to how mindless and repetitive it is. I wouldn't say most of the game is super easy, but only because.... god. Not yet. Put a pin in that.
Even AC building was kind of the least fun it's ever been, to me. The maps are another example of this, but builds are where I really think the single-player content suffers from the multiplayer focus. In any other Armored Core game, you're building for playstyles. You'll want to change up your build a lot depending on the mission, but it still feels like you have kind of a personal connection to how you choose to tackle a problem. (Which now that I mention it is much more satisfying Tactical Gameplay than anything you'll get out of 5's campaign.)
In AC5 the build process is geared towards building for Team Composition. What this mostly means, and cannot be neglected even in single player, is that you have to consider Type Matchups. There are three damage types in this game, and corresponding defense stats for each, with both weapons and armor divided by type. (Honestly almost every type of part is subdivided into categories like this, in a way that I feel kind of dumbs down the process of comparing and contrasting them; you don't have to find a generator with your preferred balance between capacity and output, for example, because the game just labels all the generators as High Output, High Capacity or Balanced.) As far as I can tell there's no consistent set of rules for how resistances and weaknesses interplay with each other, so you just kind of have to find out for every individual enemy/enemy type. But the upshot is that damage output drops off precipitously if the target has a high defense for the same damage type that your weapon deals, to the point of the wrong weapon being essentially useless.
This was intended to make you coordinate type balance with your teammates, but for a solo player it means you have to have a reliable source of DPS, and decent defense, for all three types on every build, for every mission, which is both a very uninteresting restriction and means there's very little reason to experiment once you've found a loadout that strikes a good balance. I struggled with the latter part for the first few missions, but once I worked out I wanted a kinetic damage rifle, a chemical damage rifle, a plasma gun for thermal damage and a shotgun for doing more burst damage than my piddly kinetic rifle, it carried me to the final boss (which is cool, but also a huge fuckoff difficulty spike that made me eventually look up a recommended max DPS build) with no more variations.
This was not, like... fun. Normally when you find a reliable build in Armored Core it's something you take a sort of pride in, because the reason it's reliable is that it excels at an approach to combat that you like. This was just the most Neutral build possible, because if you specialize too much you'll inevitably get stuck doing chip damage to something annoying.
Let's see, what else is there... I hate the mechanical design aesthetic, but that's subjective, I guess. Oh, the menu UI sucks ass, there's that. But aside from that... I think we have to come back to the pin. The big problem. This is the longest, most negative review I've written and I have not even gotten to my biggest complaint. The one that absolutely pervades every second of gameplay. The thing I've seen a few other people complain about but not many, which makes me feel insane, because it's so glaringly gigantic to me:
This game has the worst visual clarity I've ever seen in my fucking life.
If I am sitting more than about six feet away from my 46 inch TV, I cannot tell what the fuck is happening in Armored Core 5. If I am up close, I can keep track, but I won't be happy about it. I mentioned the game (up until the final boss) not being absolutely faceroll easy, but that is only because of the effort needed to keep even basic track of what's happening.
We're talking an absolutely garbage HUD, one that's both way too obstructive and makes the information plastered all over the center of the screen extremely hard to read. What is that fucking font? I'm not dyslexic but I feel like I suddenly understand what it's like to be dyslexic. And your ammo count being bars while your energy is a displayed number??? The ammo bars being built seamlessly into the target box so you have to squint to see where they begin and end??? I'd like that it makes information like current health pop up for enemies you're locked on to but they can't just be a fucking health bar over their heads, it's a giant window that, again, displays as a number so you have to read the horrible text, but you better read it fast because it flickers off every time you lose your lockon, and the whole entire screen glitches into nonsense when you take damage, like it's not a subtle effect, you lose all track of everything for a second, and that's not getting into all the extra bullshit when you switch to scan mode, fucking JESUS what an awful HUD.
We're talking motion blur dialed up to eleven. Thousand. Honestly I'd swear everything is subtly hazy even when standing still, like there's a Smog Filter or something? That would make sense narratively, the setting is a super-polluted wasteland, but the game does not need to be blurrier. We're talking absolutely dogshit 2006-style washed out color grading, where somehow every color blends into the standard gray environments, and yes Armored Core usually has a lot of gray for mood reasons but there's supposed to be some fucking contrast. We're talking some kind of weird shakey camera tracking that makes every movement as chaotic and disorienting as possible. (Combined with how ugly the robots are this looks like a playable Michael Bay movie.) We're talking, just, like, it's raining in a lot of missions? And rain effects shouldn't be that big of a problem in most games but on top of everything else it's just Even More Visual Noise and I hate it.
If you're thinking something snide about how I should get new glasses, I don't know what to say except that every other game in the series Looks fine to me, including the much faster ones that I'm playing on the same PS3 and TV (so, you know, it's not emulation problems either). If your eyeballs are configured to the settings that make this game anything but a hideous jerky blurry headache more power to you, but I am really, truly not exaggerating. To me it borders on Fucking Unplayable under even slightly suboptimal viewing conditions, and it's massively unpleasant under any.
I want to reiterate that I don't like feeling this way. I really liked what it sounded like this game was like. I was in its corner. I made a serious effort to engage with it on its own terms. But Christ, I did not enjoy my time one iota. Verdict Day is by all accounts vastly superior... I'll find out, I guess.
Oh, but! You have two operator ladies and they're slightly fruity, so it's actually impossible to say whether the game is good or bad.
Well, despite the insane marathon of the series I've been doing I've been an AC fan for all of three months. I have no deep-seated ideas about what the series is allowed to be. I've liked every other generation, which means I've liked some very different visions of the series. I knew this game's reputation going in. I did my research. I really, actively, wholeheartedly wanted to like it. I am not afraid of change, I like games with slow-paced tactical action, I think walljumps are cool. Not one of the stereotypical Bad Reasons not to like Armored Core 5 apply to me.
Mothers and fuckers of the jury, I assure you: there are plenty of good reasons not to like Armored Core 5. (You... you might want to settle in. I'm the kind of asshole who can talk for a lot longer about a game I hate than one I like.)
Well, mainly there's one or two really inescapably massive ones, but there are plenty of more basic areas where the game is just straightforwardly not good even at what it specifically wants to do. Let's start with one of the big problems, because it's extremely obvious and ties in to a lot of the smaller ones:
This is a heavily, heavily (online, no split-screen) multiplayer-focused game with long dead servers. I'm given to understand it's still possible to arrange a basic versus match with a P2P connection, but most game modes are no longer possible to play in any capacity.
And to be honest, I would absolutely categorically not be here for a mainly multiplayer experience even if that experience still existed, but that's not, like, a Bad thing about the game, that would be a matter of taste. There is a story campaign, which you used to be able to play co-op, and I'm not the type to begrudge a game for being a little short. I was fine with just blowing through the story and moving on. In theory.
It's not a good campaign. The plot is maybe the thinnest in the series outside of the games that literally don't have one, and I know that's saying a lot. It does have some decent banter with a persistent main cast of characters, but bantering between giving you orders is about all they're there to do.
More importantly, the mission design is mediocre at its very best. They're a small number of very long missions with a lot of updates to your objectives as you go, which sounds like the kind of thing that would make them really involved and memorable, but the thing is the objectives are almost always "go here and fight stuff on the way" and they take place on what are clearly multiplayer maps. The game doesn't have a ton of those; even in its grand total of ten missions, there are several outright repeats. And frankly I can't really tell how many maps there are because most of them are just different segments of the same big city area, which are just about distinct enough to be able to tell that they're not the same map but still basically mean the terrain is There's Some Buildings.
That's purposeful; the core gameplay requires a lot of cover and you can only gain any real altitude by jumping off walls, so there's a big focus on urban combat. That doesn't actually make it fun level design; everything looks the fucking same. It would be the absolute worst kind of level to try to navigate, but navigation is not a major concern because the game gives you a
Technically there are also a huge number of Order Missions, which are sort of non-story mini-missions you can also play solo, but I did about 30 of these and they're pretty firmly Nothing. Like, "destroy all enemies (there are four of them and they're just completely normal enemies)" material. These also just take place on the same small handful of maps, but the enemies tend to be concentrated in a pretty small area. A few of the Order Missions are AC duels and take the place of the game having an Arena; you can hunt down which ones those are and cherry pick them if you really want, but otherwise, the Order Missions are about as egregiously Filler as any content in an Armored Core game. Don't bother.
The Tactical Combat might have been a less empty promise when the game had multiplayer, but in the campaign it's a joke. What Tactics means is that aside from a smattering of big bosses and AC minibosses, there are four or five types of enemies in the game, and they each have one extremely specific behavior and one or two equally specific hard counters. Snipers? The laser sights are visible at all times, trace them back to the source and shoot them. They will not move unless you stand fully on their perch with them for like ten seconds. Big slow shield guys? Go around them or switch to your sword to smash the shield. The little flying fuckers? Groan in annoyed misery and shoot them when they decide to come near you. The other little flying fuckers, who try to suicide bomb you? This is strictly easier than the first kind because they always come near you. Good tactical combat feels kind of like solving a puzzle, but the puzzle in AC5's story missions is designed to teach basic shapes to toddlers. It's technically more methodical than the more action-based combat of other Armored Core games, but just enough so to call attention to how mindless and repetitive it is. I wouldn't say most of the game is super easy, but only because.... god. Not yet. Put a pin in that.
Even AC building was kind of the least fun it's ever been, to me. The maps are another example of this, but builds are where I really think the single-player content suffers from the multiplayer focus. In any other Armored Core game, you're building for playstyles. You'll want to change up your build a lot depending on the mission, but it still feels like you have kind of a personal connection to how you choose to tackle a problem. (Which now that I mention it is much more satisfying Tactical Gameplay than anything you'll get out of 5's campaign.)
In AC5 the build process is geared towards building for Team Composition. What this mostly means, and cannot be neglected even in single player, is that you have to consider Type Matchups. There are three damage types in this game, and corresponding defense stats for each, with both weapons and armor divided by type. (Honestly almost every type of part is subdivided into categories like this, in a way that I feel kind of dumbs down the process of comparing and contrasting them; you don't have to find a generator with your preferred balance between capacity and output, for example, because the game just labels all the generators as High Output, High Capacity or Balanced.) As far as I can tell there's no consistent set of rules for how resistances and weaknesses interplay with each other, so you just kind of have to find out for every individual enemy/enemy type. But the upshot is that damage output drops off precipitously if the target has a high defense for the same damage type that your weapon deals, to the point of the wrong weapon being essentially useless.
This was intended to make you coordinate type balance with your teammates, but for a solo player it means you have to have a reliable source of DPS, and decent defense, for all three types on every build, for every mission, which is both a very uninteresting restriction and means there's very little reason to experiment once you've found a loadout that strikes a good balance. I struggled with the latter part for the first few missions, but once I worked out I wanted a kinetic damage rifle, a chemical damage rifle, a plasma gun for thermal damage and a shotgun for doing more burst damage than my piddly kinetic rifle, it carried me to the final boss (which is cool, but also a huge fuckoff difficulty spike that made me eventually look up a recommended max DPS build) with no more variations.
This was not, like... fun. Normally when you find a reliable build in Armored Core it's something you take a sort of pride in, because the reason it's reliable is that it excels at an approach to combat that you like. This was just the most Neutral build possible, because if you specialize too much you'll inevitably get stuck doing chip damage to something annoying.
Let's see, what else is there... I hate the mechanical design aesthetic, but that's subjective, I guess. Oh, the menu UI sucks ass, there's that. But aside from that... I think we have to come back to the pin. The big problem. This is the longest, most negative review I've written and I have not even gotten to my biggest complaint. The one that absolutely pervades every second of gameplay. The thing I've seen a few other people complain about but not many, which makes me feel insane, because it's so glaringly gigantic to me:
This game has the worst visual clarity I've ever seen in my fucking life.
If I am sitting more than about six feet away from my 46 inch TV, I cannot tell what the fuck is happening in Armored Core 5. If I am up close, I can keep track, but I won't be happy about it. I mentioned the game (up until the final boss) not being absolutely faceroll easy, but that is only because of the effort needed to keep even basic track of what's happening.
We're talking an absolutely garbage HUD, one that's both way too obstructive and makes the information plastered all over the center of the screen extremely hard to read. What is that fucking font? I'm not dyslexic but I feel like I suddenly understand what it's like to be dyslexic. And your ammo count being bars while your energy is a displayed number??? The ammo bars being built seamlessly into the target box so you have to squint to see where they begin and end??? I'd like that it makes information like current health pop up for enemies you're locked on to but they can't just be a fucking health bar over their heads, it's a giant window that, again, displays as a number so you have to read the horrible text, but you better read it fast because it flickers off every time you lose your lockon, and the whole entire screen glitches into nonsense when you take damage, like it's not a subtle effect, you lose all track of everything for a second, and that's not getting into all the extra bullshit when you switch to scan mode, fucking JESUS what an awful HUD.
We're talking motion blur dialed up to eleven. Thousand. Honestly I'd swear everything is subtly hazy even when standing still, like there's a Smog Filter or something? That would make sense narratively, the setting is a super-polluted wasteland, but the game does not need to be blurrier. We're talking absolutely dogshit 2006-style washed out color grading, where somehow every color blends into the standard gray environments, and yes Armored Core usually has a lot of gray for mood reasons but there's supposed to be some fucking contrast. We're talking some kind of weird shakey camera tracking that makes every movement as chaotic and disorienting as possible. (Combined with how ugly the robots are this looks like a playable Michael Bay movie.) We're talking, just, like, it's raining in a lot of missions? And rain effects shouldn't be that big of a problem in most games but on top of everything else it's just Even More Visual Noise and I hate it.
If you're thinking something snide about how I should get new glasses, I don't know what to say except that every other game in the series Looks fine to me, including the much faster ones that I'm playing on the same PS3 and TV (so, you know, it's not emulation problems either). If your eyeballs are configured to the settings that make this game anything but a hideous jerky blurry headache more power to you, but I am really, truly not exaggerating. To me it borders on Fucking Unplayable under even slightly suboptimal viewing conditions, and it's massively unpleasant under any.
I want to reiterate that I don't like feeling this way. I really liked what it sounded like this game was like. I was in its corner. I made a serious effort to engage with it on its own terms. But Christ, I did not enjoy my time one iota. Verdict Day is by all accounts vastly superior... I'll find out, I guess.
Oh, but! You have two operator ladies and they're slightly fruity, so it's actually impossible to say whether the game is good or bad.