Christopher Hilliard

Its a From Soft design, where its a boss fight simulator with some forgettable nobodies in between. The bosses are also massively more difficult than the rest of the level, to the point that every enemy on the level combined is less damaging than a single attack from the bosses. At several points it felt like the designers resented the normal gameplay for distracting from their bosses. The environments are generally beautiful, though there's lots of grey and brown. The cities manage to mix believability and good level design in a way that is often lacking in the mecha genre. Its not the Armored Core that I remembered, and definitely not the one i wanted.

Its an interesting development in the series, were levels consist of entire campaigns across a region on an open world map. The addition of siege mechanics and missions adds a level of strategic thought that changes up the traditional combo based hack and slash. The crafting system and persistent inventory across characters, combined with the new ability to select mounts an guard animals, provides a sense of continuity between play throughs. Its an impressive innovation for the series, but it does wander a bit from the well established gameplay of the main series. If you enjoyed Dynasty Warriors 6, and Kessen 3, then you'll probably like this. If you saw open world and expected Skyrim, you are going to be disappointed.