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PS2 Review - 'Armored Core: Nine Breaker'

by Agustin on Oct. 10, 2005 @ 1:04 a.m. PDT

It’s all about the battles with Armored Core: Nine Breaker, taking you straight to the action with two modes of play, hardcore training and arena combat. Design your own customized AC with over 400 parts to choose from. The possibilities are endless.

Genre: Mecha / Action
Publisher: Agetec
Developer: From Software
Release Date: September 13, 2005

I’ve been working at a videogame store for over a year now, and for the most part I’ve enjoyed it. The customers are among the biggest dolts I’ve ever met in my life, true, but there are a handful of people that I truly enjoy speaking with, and therefore keep me working there despite the low pay. I love it.

But, as any videogame store employee will tell you, there are some quirks to the whole business of seeing every gamer within twenty miles come through your territory. I’ve realized how sub-sub-subcultures stick to the strangest franchises to the death, no matter what any silly reviewer thinks about their favorite game. I’ve heard (and all too often unwillingly participated in) of people arguing over which RAB strategy was best, or which character classes are worthless in Metal Dungeon.

While I should have known it thanks to the relentless strings of releases in the series, for some reason, Armored Core is a favorite franchise among an awkward subset of customers and even one of my fellow employees. Armored Core, a once-great series fallen from grace due to little change and over-exposure, is the most popular un-popular game that I can think of. To these fans, developer From Software could do no wrong.

Well, until Ninebreaker, that is.

While my interest in the series faded long before even Armored Core 3 hit shelves, most fans stuck with it straight through Nexus, which somewhat disappointed the most hardcore players due to the belated addition of analog controls. (I found that to be a positive, but from speaking with a handful of “hardcore” AC players, apparently this didn’t play off too well in that community.) But at least Nexus carried a standard single player mode along with the normal multiplayer experience; Ninebreaker (the Quake III: Arena of the series following the earlier, aptly-titled Armored Core: Master of Arena on the original Playstation) has little to no surprising gameplay experiences to be had.

Ninebreaker is a training simulator and an A.I. deathmatch release, one so dry that even the biggest AC fan I have ever met was thoroughly disappointed by the title. Those are harsh words coming from an AC superfan such as this. Few could argue this man down from his position as an Armored Core apologist, yet the release of Ninebreaker is so completely banal that it has done just that. Before Ninebreaker, AC games were obviously designed for previously obtained fans and nobody else. Now, even the fans are uninterested in the latest offering.

Strangely enough, the main new mode is the Training Simulator, which works exactly like one would expect. As a glorified Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions, it works extremely well: Not fun at all, but your AC piloting skills will surely increase tenfold, if not more, in the process.

The goals are always simple. Shoot X things within X seconds. Run this specific way and then this specific way in X seconds. And of course, the combined shoot X things and run this specific way within X seconds. After running through the nearly 6 hours of training gameplay (time spent depends heavily on skill, however), all opponents who have not done the same will fall at your feet. That said, there is not a granule of fun anywhere in this mode. The only place that has any of that is the deathmatch mode – the singleplayer deathmatch, that is.

This mode is made up of online-style battles for rank, not unlike the atmosphere on the Halo 2 Live community, minus any communication with real people (which is not necessarily a bad thing, looking at the Halo community…). The goal is to crawl up the rankings until the final showdown with the greatest AC is to be had: the battle with Ninebreaker himself. I could never imagine taking down such a beast with my oxidized mecha skills – for me, this game was hard.

But me, I’m not an AC master. And AC masters are probably the only people who would think to buy this game. Their verdict? In the words of a particularly big AC freak: “Ninebreaker was a chump.”

Of course, being an Armored Core game, graphics almost should not even be discussed – since Armored Core 2, the only real visual jump in the entire series, we’ve all known what to expect from From Software in this regard: Not a whole lot.

The customizable nature of the AC’s does give From a bit of an excuse as to why they look so shoddy; they have to have so many interchangeable parts that no coherent design choices could be made without thousands of hours of exhaustive design research. After all, these parts aren’t legos; each has to be a distinctively designed piece.

The environments are where pure laziness rears its ugly, ugly head. Ninebreaker looks (and feels) like a first, maybe, on a good day, second generation PS2 release. Jaggies are everywhere; textures are simplistic, pixilated, and grungy. Pop-up and fog are much bigger problems than they should be. This game is about as ugly as it gets for a standable retail release.

And the sounds? As with every other aspect of this game, there is absolutely nothing here that hasn’t been heard already in Armored Core 2, or even the PS1 games.

Armored Core: Ninebreaker is a sad enough release that it is disappointing even to the biggest fans, the most skilled Armored Core players. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could justify purchasing this game unless you have an extremely powerful need to wade through an assault of boring training missions so you can take down your friend in system-link. If this series was stagnant before it is completely irrelevant and perhaps even dead now; only a next-gen masterpiece could bring it back to former grace now.

Even if you’re a fan, Ninebreaker probably isn’t for you.

Score: 4.5/10

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