An old school action hit that features great customization options and offers a nice challenge. Recommended!

User Rating: 8 | Armored Core: Master of Arena PS
By cigarcat | Review Date:
Having never played an Armored Core game before this one I can still say that I enjoyed the overall experience quite a bit and it piqued my interest in seeking out other similar titles. It serves as a great way to indulge your pre-adolescent fantasies of being in a giant robot and blowing stuff up. That said, this game requires some patience as it can be rather difficult at first especially when adjusting to the controls. For instance when you need to avoid enemy fire you need to boost your mech out of harm's way by activating the thrusters with the 'x' button while strafing with one of the shoulder buttons. To look up and down you need to use R2 and L2. This would have been made easier if they had implemented a dual analog function as it is a later PS1 title that uses quite a few of the system's fancier features such as the ability to import your mech from the two previous installments. The game also boasts system link compatibility and enough content to span two disks.

Now that I have gotten my main complaint out of the way I'd like to discuss all the things that I really enjoyed about this game. First being the story; while basic it still manages to throw in a few twists. I centers on you as a Raven; one of many mercenaries for hire who pilot giant robots called armored cores. You become a Raven in hopes of settling a score with the top ranked arena fighter of these Ravens. After accepting a few missions you eventually get an arena sponsor thus allowing you to engage in one on one battle with other AC pilots. Completing missions and wining arena battles earns you credits so that you may enter the shop and buy new parts to customize your AC to your liking. This is another one of Armored Core's staple features. Once you are able to enter the arena you can start enjoying the second disk that has dozens of arena challenges that aren't a part of the main story and require specific categories of leg parts to participate in certain arena ladders.

Both the visuals and sound are adequate but also quite dated. There is a plethora of different arenas to challenge your rivals in each offering different scenery and effective strategies in order to thwart your opponents. And also the missions provide some good variety in environments and objectives.

Overall I really liked this game and would recommend it to those who have enough patience to get over a moderate learning curve and those with a penchant for classic PS1 action titles.

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