Price: £49.99 Players: Offline 1 - 1-4, Online - 2-24 Widescreen: Yes Dolby Digital 5.1: Yes Xbox Live content: Yes 60 Hz: No Back in the days when the Sony Playstation was still cutting edge and PCs were something that people with lots of space used to complete relatively simple calculations, I spent many an hour happily destroying robots on the original Armored Core. Since those carefree halycon days things have moved on a little, as has my taste in gaming. Nowadays, I have a PC that fits on my desktop, as well as one that fits in my bag and I haven't touched a console for several years. Imagine my bubbling joy then when I was presented with an opportunity to play the latest outing from the Armored Core stables, Armored Core 4. Surely all those ours spent enjoying mechanical mayhem and destruction would be recreated, but this time in glorious uber-graphics, on the Xbox 360. Now I feel I must explain that I am a PC gamer and as such I prefer the mouse/keyboard interface to the - what I consider to be - vastly inferior joypad option. Turns out that the control method was the least of my worries.

AC4 has a style about it I like, but not one that I haven't seen before. The out-of-game menu system is weighted nicely to let you get straight in and start playing or geek it up big time by looking at the type of weapons available to you, with stats and information about what difference that particular piece of equipment will make to you overall kit and so on and so forth. Of course you need to kill things and complete missions to get cash to spend on the geekery, so onwards to the killing bits. After the obligatory training missions, you are let loose on a city in need of liberation, with a load of live ammo and an itchy trigger finger. Unfortunately, at this point in the game, a whole host of problems begin to become apparent. Firstly, the viewpoint of the game is far to close to the robot. This means that the moment rockets get fired at you and explosions begin, almost your entire screen is obscured. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if you robot had some manoeuvrability. But it doesn’t and this is the second major problem. The sensitivity if the control method is such that it takes faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too long to turn. There is a ‘lock-on’ option, designed to help you keep an eye on your enemies, but I found it too easy to lose the lock, so it wasn’t too much of a help really. There are jets located on your robot to allow you to burst forwards and backwards and to strafe quickly, which work well, but the turning is a real issue.

Next up was the level of difficulty of the game. I waltzed through the first 10 levels of the game with out too much of an issue, which seems to suggest that it is a tad too easy. I also passed the game over to an X-boxer friend of mine who agreed this was the case, though he got even further than I did. He also told me that the game is an excellent source of accomplishment points, as the amount of points you get far outweigh the effort you put in, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depends upon which way you look at it. Finally, the look of the game itself was a bit of a disappointment for me. I am partial to some pretty graphics on my PC and have always been just a little (only a little mind you) jealous of the graphical capabilities of the Xbox. I have to say that I was just a little surprised by the seeming lack of effort put into the graphics in this game. Not that they were bad, just not great either. I guess that kind of sums up this game, nothing particularly great about it and an apparent lack of effort in designing and producing it, which is a shame. Pop goes my bubble. Still on the upside, if accomplishment points is your thing, stump up the cash for this game and grind them out.

GRAPHICS SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC GAMEPLAY ENJOYMENT OVERALL Review copyright © Gaz Williams, 2007.