Armored Core For Answer is a giant mech fighting game done by From Software, who also did Tenchu Fatal Shadows (which I really liked), so I was looking forward to playing this game.

  The story is about as bleak as you’re going to see in a sci-fi game. The Earth has been completely polluted while most people live in satellites in orbit. Corporations have taken over the world, and most people are working as slaves for these corporations, while the Earth is one big battleground between these corporations using these giant Mechs, called NEXTs. At the start of the game, you are given the choice of signing with one of three teams, and signing with a particular team will affect what kind of NEXTs you get to use.

  The graphics in this game are a bit of a mixed bag. The FMVs are stunning – particularly the opening movie, which is one of the best I’ve seen out of this entire gen of games – but the in-game graphics are a bit underwhelming. The environments in particular are fairly bland, though they’re often destructible at least,  and really don’t seem like anything that the PS2 couldn’t do with later-era games.

  The sound effects are okay, like the graphics, nothing particularly notable. I noticed the music almost right away however. It’s excellent and really adds to the mood of the game. It’s similar to the kind of music you’d hear in games like Wipeout and it works surprisingly well.

  The big question is “How does it play?” The answer is “surprisingly fun”. If you sit down and spend a few minutes going through the tutorials, the game is surprisingly easy to pick up, play and control. In fact, I’ve heard they streamlined the controls a bit for this game in particular. However, having never played an AC game before, I wasn’t prepared to be bombarded by customization options. It took me time to sit down, decipher the manual and figure out how customizing would affect my machine, and I really felt overwhelmed when all I wanted to do was shoot things. That said – I really did have a good time playing with the paint/decal options and changing how my NEXT looked.

  The missions themselves are often more bite size chunks than real in-depth campaigns, with many of them being extremely short. The NEXTs come with an auto-targeting feature as you approach the enemy, which mostly works well though it gets touchy at times and can be hard to single out a specific enemy. Overall, the controls are fairly intuitive and easy to get used to, and there are a few other layouts to try if you don’t find the standard one to your liking.

  Overall, ACFA is a fun game. It’s a good a place as any to start if you’re interested in mech games, fairly easy to get into, particularly at the start, and has loads of customization options, if you’re interested in that aspect of the game. It’s not a perfect game, but definitely worth checking out if you’re in need of something different.