The focus of this game’s detractors, the overheating and ECM being nigh-omnipresent, is kind of misplaced. Fromsoft definitely went overboard with these two, but it is kind of refreshing to really consider radars and radiators when customizing. Customization has generally been expanded here with the great new addition of Tuning, which is basically min-maxing certain AC parts. Each part has different stats you can min-max, but there’s enough ways to negate overheating and the problems it causes your mech that it never feels restrictive. All that aside, the customization is generally great. The other big addition, hangar units, adds another factor to consider in picking a core. I didn’t engage with these that much, but I could see myself playing around with them if I ever come back to this.

Hey guys? Guess what? In the year 2004, Fromsoft finally added analogue aiming to this series. Now you can not only play the game with analogue controls, but also drop weapons and use extensions with the press of a button. There’s still one extra button though. They really should’ve used this for reloading. In this game, if you shoot a quickfire gun a certain amount of times, you can’t shoot the gun for a while while you ‘reload’, even though you don’t actually press a button and no reload animation occurs. It’s a fine balancing change but it feels very imprecise and odd, so why they didn’t just use a more conventional style is beyond me.

One change to customization that initially worried me was that parts now depreciate in value after being used. This seemed like a change that could really inhibit experimentation, but the parts don’t depreciate that much, and missions have much bigger payouts, a large part of which are often contained within advanced payments. I think they might’ve overcorrected a bit though. Oftentimes I would fail a mission pretty bad but still make a solid amount of money. I obviously would’ve made more money if I won, but making any profit just feels somewhat wrong when you fail. This may be due to the removal of Human+, but I feel like Human+ is a really good solution to this problem, so I’m not sure why they removed it. The arena, too, could’ve been a good way to counteract this problem, but it was heavily altered to become normal missions that are scarcely available. It’s kind of weird that the series already had two cool ways to alter difficulty and Nexus just ignored them.

Really though, I think what hurts this game is the mission design. There’s one infamous mission in this game where you shoot a single helicopter, which only takes ten seconds. A lot of missions suffer the same affliction this mission does, just to a much lesser degree. Missions are just very barebones for the most part. The map designs are simple, and the objectives are usually just to kill every enemy. A significant amount of missions here are just going into this plain training/test room and fighting robots for scientists to observe. These tests kinda foreshadow things in later missions, but this could’ve been done better. Don’t get me wrong, there are some good missions here, but when there are so many basic missions it just gets kinda tiring, especially after 3 and Silent Line had so many great missions. After some thought, I realized that all of this may be due to the story having ‘branching paths’. The story reacts to you, but this is almost exclusively contained within news reports and emails as opposed to any developments actually happening in missions, at least until the end of the game. Yes, the final mission is epic. Does this mean the entire story is super awesome? Eh, not really. It’s fine, and it follows up the previous games in a satisfying way, but there’s pretty much no reoccurring characters here and very little sense of worldbuilding. It does the job as an Armored Core story, but with each game that bar feels lower and lower.

As per tradition, this game’s visuals are an incremental improvement over the last game. People mention a blurry filter that I honestly didn't notice. It's probably there, I just have a PC that isn't super great. However, the soundtrack is very unique and overall really good. I think it’s a little overrated, but yeah, there are some cool songs here.

So yeah, if this game had better missions, I’d have no problem calling it great. However, as it is I’m a little hesitant to. It has many great elements and additions, but mission design is a massive weak link. I’ve heard the second disc has a lot of remakes of missions from old games along with a proper arena, but I kinda want to go to a new game instead of playing remakes of levels that I already played recently. Maybe I’ll come back to this, but 7/10 for now. It's pretty good, and if you like the series you'll probably like this.