Since I knew I wouldn’t have access to my gaming PC over the Chinese New Year holidays, I made sure to have something to play on my PSP in the meantime and the game I picked was Armored Core: Formula Front. I’ve had an eye on this game for a while now but couldn’t find an English language version of it and playing such a complex game without being able to understand the on screen text was completely out of the question.
I’m normally not a fan of Japanese games, so I had to look it up to know that Armored Core refers to a fairly well established mecha action game series. This PSP version involves mecha as well, but the twist here that made me interested in this title in the first place is that you’re not really supposed to manually pilot the Armored Cores, as the mecha are known. Instead, you’re supposed to put together your own stable of ACs from a collection of parts, devise a strategy for them and the AI will try to implement your strategy as well as it can in a series of gladiatorial one-on-one fights against ACs from other teams. This makes it more of a strategy game than an action game as success depends on finding the optimal combination of parts to make an AC that’s well suited to carrying out a particular fighting strategy against enemies with specific builds and strategies of their own.
As you might expect, there’s not much of a story in a game like this. The in-game fiction is that the player is the “Architect” of a new team just entering the Formula Front fighting leagues. You naturally start at the bottom of the ranking tables and must defeat the team one rung higher than you to advance. Occasionally, defeated teams will demand a rematch that you cannot refuse, using a modified version of the AC you first beat. You sometimes receive messages from other teams and news items about how the other teams are doing against one another, but all of it is easily ignored because it has no discernible effect in gameplay.
The most well developed part of the game are the AC design and testing labs. With over 400 different parts available, you could lose quite a few hours just by going through all the available options. You can build traditional bipedal mecha that walk on two legs, or one that walks on four legs, or even a legless one that hovers in the air. You can equip your AC with a different weapon for each hand, and even stow backup weapons in internal hangars or just choose to do without arms entirely and instead have twin cannons directly attached to the torso. Additional weapons can be mounted on the AC’s back and some models even have the ability to deploy semi-autonomous drones that can independently seek out and attack the enemy.
Each part is differentiated by tons of statistics. Heavy weapons can only be supported on heavier arms and AC designs. An AC built on a speedy hover chassis can zoom all around the battlefield, but don’t expect it to be able to support much weight. Parts consume energy and create heat which the player will need to manage and balance prudently by installing the appropriate generators and radiators. Weapons have finite amounts of ammunition and an AC that is too lightly armed might run out against a well armored or highly evasive enemy and lack any sort of offensive capability by the end of a prolonged match. Finally, the AC will also need radar devices to detect its enemy and fire control systems to lock on to it.
If you think that you’re done once you’ve kitted out your own custom-designed AC, then think again, because it turns out that this is just the beginning. Many of the parts can tuned to enhance particular characteristics, improving the energy output from a generator, say, or the resistance of the AC’s main body to energy attacks. Next, you need to allocate resources to the AC’s AI. Each AC has a finite amount of processing power which varies depending on the head module you choose for it. This processing power is divided into blocks that you must allocate as you see fit among different areas such as offensive or defensive actions, navigating the terrain of the battle arena, being able to search for and know where the enemy is etc. Then you need to set the behavioral parameters that the AI will try to adhere to. Do you want it to stay at long range from the enemy or stay as close to it as possible? Should it prioritize offensive actions or defensive ones? Should it jump around a lot or stay on the ground?
One last area of customization is equipping AI modchips. The battle is divided into 30 second intervals and you can insert a modchip into a particular interval to get your AC to perform some specific actions, overriding the previous AI parameters. This can involve relatively simple actions such as keeping away from the enemy AC while staying inside your own weapons’ maximum range to complex maneuvers to position your own AC behind that of your enemy through repeated jumping motions. One oddity about the game is that you’re given access to the entire selection of parts right from the start, but gain modchips only by winning battles or completing certain achievements.
The game challenges you by pitting specific pre-built ACs from the opposing teams. This means that there’s not much replay value to the game. There are only so many pre-built AC designs and once you’re devised a way to defeat them all, it’s over. Still, the designers have some pretty nasty surprises to throw your way, including agile robots that try to get behind yours to blast it in the back, heavy weapons ACs that try to overheat your own to death, and even at least one that seemed to actively hide while its drones did all the work. One complaint that I have here is that it’s far too cumbersome to actually check out what parts the enemy ACs are constructed off because you’re shown only the part number. Unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of which parts correspond to the numbers and their statistics, you’ll need to do a lot of flipping back and forth between the enemy AC screen and your own design labs.
The battles take place in various different locales which can affect the performance of the ACs. An AC that specializes in sniping will do better in an open arena than one filled with lots of obstructions and cover for example. This English version of the game allows the player to manually pilot the ACs, but the controls are so poor that I barely bothered. Programming the AI to make it do what you want works better, but can still be frustrating because there’s always an element of chance on whether or not the AI will make the appropriate decisions. The graphics on the ACs are particularly detailed, but nothing spectacular otherwise.
My final comments: this is definitely a niche game for a very specific audience. If you’ve always wanted to design your own giant robots and program it to fight in a particular way, this is right up your alley. If you just want to pilot a giant robot yourself, there’s are plenty of better alternatives.