Namco Bandai has officially announced a release date of March 20th for Armored Core 5, the newest entry in the long-running series of mecha combat games. The game will be available on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
As with previous games in the Armored Core series, the player is cast in the role of a mercenary piloting a futuristic bipedal war machine, one of the titular armored cores. (Not the catchiest name, frankly, though it’s still a cut above calling your giant battling robots “wanzers” like in the Front Mission series.) Between combat missions, the player can customize their vehicle with numerous different components and weapons. The wide range of customization options always been a major emphasis of the series-players can select different weapons, upgrade components such as their power generator, fire control, and booster jets, and even swap out their core’s arms, legs, head, or torso for different parts with different capabilities.
Armored Core 5 will apparently see something of a change in style from its predecessors, with a greater emphasis on tactics and use of the environment than in previous games. The armored cores portrayed in this game are about half the size of those in previous games, averaging five meters tall rather than ten. The developers say this will open up many gameplay options that weren’t present before, because the combatants in Armored Core 5 will be small enough to use the landscape for cover or stealth much more extensively than in previous games. The game will apparently include many more urban environments than previous Armored Core games as a result.
I like this idea. One of the disadvantages of being in a vehicle over 30 feet tall like in the previous games was that it greatly limited your ability to fight by means other than going out into the open in the open and just slugging it out with the enemy, since at that size the landscape is using you for cover. It’s also a bit more plausible than the larger armored cores of previous games, since- though I’ve enjoyed the mecha genre ever since discovering BattleTech as a teenager- from an engineering perspective building a giant bipedal robot to use as your military’s analog of a tank really doesn’t make any sense. The smaller size of the armored cores in the new game puts them closer in scale to (really, really big) infantry, which makes the idea more reasonable.
Yes, I realize that fretting about the questionable scientific realism of a video game about giant Japanese robots battling in the distant future is silly. I can’t help it.
The game will also feature a team-based multiplayer mode, which is supposed to follow in the footsteps of the single-player game by placing more emphasis on tactics. One number of each team is designated the team’s “Operator,” who has access to a special interface that he can use to monitor the course of the battle as a whole and issue instructions to teammates to coordinate their efforts. It’s a cool idea that I think could have a lot of promise if it’s done well. And provided you’re not playing with idiots, of course.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.
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