Reviews// Armored Core: Formula Front Extreme Battle (PSP)

But it's not just the fighting that makes Armored Core an involving game. There's all the tedious (did I say tedious, sorry, I really meant fascinating) configuring of your robot before battle commences. And boy are these guys configurable. Each robot has a selection of heads, arms, bodies (or Core's, presumably Armored ones), weapons, shoulder pads (cunningly called Extenstions, to avoid any Alexis Carrington in Dynasty misconceptions), kneecaps, generator (for powering your AC), radiator, high-heeled sneakers and non-leak panty liners that you can kit them up with to improve their chances in battle. Thing is, more heavy gear might make you more impervious to minor things like armour piercing shells and charged plasma attacks. But it'll also slow you down, and use your energy faster, so there's a world of strategy to consider. During battle, you have to use your manoeuvrability and weaponry judiciously. Overuse will cause your heat to escalate and can cause a system shut-down - and loss of the battle. Different combinations will have different success against different opponents. And this is the core of Armored Core - lots and lots of design strategy and trial and error.

After you've spent hours designing the perfect battle-ready mech, you get to paint it. And you can paint it any colour you like... Our da-glo pink and lilac battle monster will surely have filled our cold-hearted, emotionless mechanical opponents with fear, either that, or made them miss from cackling their pants off. Then you can choose yourself a team Logo. Either pick one of the pre-prepared ones, or create your own using the suprisingly fully-featured paint program included.


The interface of AC:FF is superbly designed, with a considerable number of menus that are easily navigated. The only downside is that occasionally, one part of the interface looks visually very similar to another, and when you want to enter battle you can end up back in the garage fine tuning your mech. But you do quickly get used to this. The only other noticably frustrating aspect of the interface is how slow scrolling is, whether it's moving colour sliders up and down when mixing paint colours, or moving text in the logo editor, both are too slow to be useable, and the speed stays constant. Scroll-acceleration is badly needed. You need the slow speed to fine tune adjustments, but when you want to go from one end of a colour-slider to the other - it takes AGES!

Once your AC is all rigged up and ready to go, you have two choices, one is to take him into battle yourself, actually make him run around and shoot in response to your amateurish mashing of the PSPs control buttons. If this all sounds a bit tedious and bourgeois to you, you have a second option, which is to let your little bot go into battle under Artificial Intelligence. After all, your PSP is over 75,000 times more powerful than the whole control room that NASA used to pretend to put a man on the moon, so it should be able to control one fictional robot as it attempts to dent the casing of another, equally fictional, robot. Thing is, the PSP turns out to be pathetic at this, and you have to improve your ACs chances by teaching it tactics by deploying pre-programmed control chips. Chips which you earn by progressing through the game... d'oh!

Once you've battled, the game provides you with a full breakdown of your performance, along with enough statistics to keep a football-management fan happy. Careful evaluation of these can enable you to improve your performance in coming battles.


But ultimately, it's not AI battles that make AC a compelling game. Though the Japanese might not agree with this, since the original Japanese release ONLY offered AI battles. But the Extreme Battle version released in the rest of the world (and then re-released in Japan) allows users to control their AC manaually against a computer opponent, or to play on-line against other human opponents.

When you're in battle and winning, AC is a fast and fun combat game. But there's no chance of you winning in battle without the right set up, and that calls for hours and hours of trial and error. There's nothing more satisfying than getting your AC into top-notch fighting configuration and taking it to victory. But there's also nothing more frustrating than finding that your previously indomitable creation founders like a little girl in the ring with Mike Tyson during the next battle. It's this aspect of the game that will make AC:FF hugely popular with some players, and equally unpopular with many more.

SPOnG score B
Armored Core is fun as both a beat 'em up and as a strategy game. The characters are almost infinitely configurable, and both they and the environments are extremely good looking. But this can't hide the fact that the game is an unusual mix of third-person 3D shoot'em up and painstaking strategy game. As such it's unusual enough to make it both interesting and compelling... but it's a game that will only appeal to a dedicated niche audience.