My first foray in the Armored Core series. I had made the mistake of playing the game while doing other stuff, and while I still enjoyed the game itself I wasn't able to appreciate the games sound design.

I was able to hear a little bit of the music that was made for the game, the fast paced electronic music that thumps when I was fighting other AC's in the arena and in some of the missions were very exhilarating and added to the stress/enjoyment of zooming around and shooting my grenade arms and energy cannons.

I went thru a bit of missions first before jumping into the arena and quickly found the "easy" way of fighting with the characters in the game. But a couple of restarts were needed of course. I didn't do a HUMAN PLUS playthrough, I saved scrummed whenever I would go over the threshold of losing.

I had to remap the controls, I quickly realized that the initial controls the game gives you was the most annoying way to play the game, if you can finish the game with the original control layout you have big kudos from me. I had remapped the weapon based stuff to the triggers and bumpers, and the camera controls on the face buttons.

The story and gameplay mechanics of Armored Core 2 were very simple and repetitive but all throughout I never felt bored, it's usually the "destroy this amount of enemies", or "go to this specific are and destroy this thing but oh wait there's an enemy?!" It's just a different variant of each mission but it still felt fresh every time. Each mission kept me on my toes and while I was save scumming I still tried my best not to go into debt or get as much damage as I can.

If you can get past the clunky controls and the high skill ceiling it's a pretty amazing game.