Armored Core: Formula Front is a giant robot action game, but it’s not your
typical giant robot action game. In Armored Core the combat is almost
secondary to robot design and customization, which means that you’ll either
really enjoy this game or it will bore you quickly. It all depends on the type
of giant robot guy (or gal) you are. If you were born in the distant future in
a robot-battling kind of universe, would you prefer to be a robot engineer
hanging out in a lab and sending your creations off to war or would you rather
be a robot jockey?
 |
| A giant robot with a giant gun. |
OK, so technically the robots in Armored Core are not fighting a war. The
premise of the game is that future sports fans have grown weary of watching
men in tights or shorts chasing balls around and have instead turned their
attention to one-on-one matches fought by the aforementioned giant robots. The
duels are fought between robot teams that pick one of their five robots to
represent them in the match in the hopes that their robot will emerge
victorious and the team will climb up a spot in the league rankings. It should
comes as no surprise to you that you’re in control of one of these robot teams
and that you must claw your way up from the bottom of the “Bottom” league by
building better robots.
The vast, and I emphasize vast, majority of your time will be spent in the
garage tweaking your robots. If you just try and skip the whole design thing,
your robots will quickly get chewed up in battle and you can expect to be the
perennial Kansas City Royals of the robot leagues. Ask any KC fan and they’ll
tell you this is not a fun place to be. So anyway, each robot is rated in six
areas – attack, defense, mobility, energy, cooling, and ECM resistance (hmm,
ECMCM?) – and how well you balance these factors is measured in your robot’s
rating and in its performance in battle. Of course, each part you place on
your robot will add to some areas and decrease your stats in others. For
example, placing more armor on your robot may increase defense, but it will
come at the cost of mobility and cooling. The game comes with an absolutely
dizzying array of parts that can connect to the various parts of your robots
including their heads, arms, and torsos. Unfortunately it’s not always clear
how adding or removing a particular part will affect your robot as the parts
are definitely lacking any kind of decent documentation in the game. The game
attempts to give you constant feedback as you play with the parts through the
use of a small radar chart, but these things are just as confusing here as
they are in an Excel spreadsheet. To really see the results of your design
changes you’ll have to field test your robot which means that you’ll often
lose a battle due to poor design choices. You have to have a good attitude
about losing here, because lose you will and you will do it a lot.
In addition to customizing your robots’ parts, you can create their color
scheme using a fairly sophisticated palette tool. You can even design your own
team logo from scratch using the in-game paint program. Pretty cool stuff for
you design freaks out there.
Page 2 of 2 »
