On march 20th of this year I went to my local EB Games and with the excitement of a little girl getting a puppy I bought my copy of Armored Core 5. As a fan of the series I knew what I was getting into, I only own every AC game ever. So I bring it home and it immediately starts off with a problem; the opening cutscene. In all other AC games the opening involves a few of the coolest looking mechs in the game duking it out in a cool environment, and that part hasn’t changed. However, a staple of the series, the soundtrack, has become as bland as any other game music. AC started of with electronic music and slowly worked its way to some awesome orchestral scores in AC4. Well in AC5 the music, rather than serving as a center-piece, serves as the background; it’s just a means to make the game less boring. Even the intro music has no epic feeling or scope.
So after This I’m a little down but I charge in and start having some mech killing fun. Let me just say the game play has nothing to do with why I put the game down; The game plays well and I, unlike many others, don’t rue the series for it’s change of direction to be more of a “real robot” game. The real problem is From’s new obsession with the internet. I want to buy some parts to upgrade my mech so I head over to the shop and click on new parts; what happens next is baffling to say the least, it’s empty. The store is completely empty, so I go back and notice a new addition to the store, the “used parts” section. So I go into there and there is a sparse variety of used parts which I can choose from. So I make do with my used parts, “no problem” I’m thinking. Perhaps as the game goes on I get to join a corporation and then I can buy new parts to keep the balance going throughout the campaign. After another hour of play I figure it’s time to upgrade again when I notice the used parts store is giving me an error, “could not contact the server” or something to that effect. So now, I can’t upgrade my mech at all therefore I can probably only continue a little further before I run into a mission I just can’t beat. So I continue and beat the mission I’m currently on. When I’ve one I notice the mission over screen gives me the same error as the shop, and I just did that whole mission and got no money for it. So I put the game down and haven’t picked it back up since.
I recently read an article saying that games need to vie for your complete attention early on otherwise your chances of buying DLC drop exponentially with each passing week. On top of that you never want a use to walk away from your game, it’s the single worst thing you can do in gaming. If From had of just thought for a second to say “Hey, what happens if the servers aren’t working properly or get overloaded on launch day?”. They may have seen that this would basically make the whole game unplayable. What happens when the servers go the way of Chromehounds servers? I’ll bet you that From will do the same as sega and just leave it at that. For some reason these companies don’t want to say “Hey community, here’s the server software we use for this game, set up your own servers and we’ll throw a little patch into the game to find servers to play on”, nope they just leave it dead.
So in conclusion, I’m not sure when I’ll pick AC5 back up again, but maybe you’ll get a review eventually.
The Mainframe 