 Review By: Cameron Morris |
Developer: | FromSoftware |
| Publisher: | Agetec | |
| Genre: | Action | |
| ESRB: | Teen | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Memory Card | |
| Buy Now: |   |
With Armored Core: Last Raven, diehard fans of the series are unquestionably getting their deepest desire: a tough-as-nails continuation of the arcade-style mech combat they love so much. Those of you who have been into these games for the decade that they've been coming out, you can stop here, go out and buy it. But there is another audience, the newbies like myself, who might try to sink their teeth into this game without any prior experience with the Armored Core franchise, and ours is a sorely different experience in almost every way imaginable. If you are one of these people, the newcomers who look at the box and say, “Oh my! Giant robots, and the game has ‘Raven’ right in the title! Very cool,” then please continue reading, and we will try to cover how cool this can really be.
The premise of Last Raven is simple in that you pilot a giant robot, working as a freelance agent in the middle of a brewing war, that goes around blowing up military vehicles and other giant robots. The plot is at no point anything to write home about, but hey, that isn’t what you’re here for, right? I mean, these are giant robots! That equals instant fun. Or should.
I mentioned in the first paragraph that newcomers to the series will get an entirely different experience out of Last Raven than will veterans, and while I cannot say this with absolute certainty, as I am not a veteran, I have heard tales of how well they have managed to deal with this game. Now, truth be told, I consider myself a bit of a tough guy gamer, never willing to turn down a challenge and never having seen a monster too scary for me to butt heads with, but this game went a long way towards redefining what brutal difficulty is. I can’t even make a proper analogy for it. Once you reach your first confrontation with a major enemy AC, and this can take a while depending on the path you take, you may be feeling cocky because the first few missions were a bit of a breeze. About twenty seconds in, however, you realize that the game has merely spent these first few mission putting its gloves on, and, by the way, it is now going to break your face. I will be honest with you: when I fought my first major enemy, I was defeated so quickly that I thought I had made some critical error in how I handled the fight. So I tried again. And again. And again. This went on for some time, each one resulting in a very similar whooping. I will say that this is the first action game that I have ever gone online for with the intent of looking for tips in a fight that couldn’t even properly qualify as a boss.
Yes, I was and still pretty much am a newbie at Armored Core, but that’s essentially the point: not only is the game utterly brutal to people who have never partaken in the series before, it offers no way for you to familiarize yourself with the controls. There is no break-in period, as it were, because you are dropped right into your first mission, given your assignment, and sent on your way. That’s it. No tutorial, no nice little explanation of functions that your AC can perform, no nothing. There is a training mode of sorts where you can send your robot up against a rather washed down, pansified, computer-controlled bot, but not only will you fail to find instructions here, if you set the thing to attack mode you will quickly become familiar with how easy it is for training robots to kill you. That’s just not right. I don’t want to harp on the difficulty too much, but if I were given alone time with the creators of the game, my first question would be this: “Hey, could you give us new guys a break? Even a little one?” It’s just daunting.
The setup for the game is that you are trying to help one of two sides in a war that will begin in a day. That’s basically it. Last Raven opts out of any real storytelling by relegating narrative to e-mails that you receive between missions. All the characters might as well remain nameless, and after a while the only thing you’re going to associate with any given person in the game is the AC they might use to destroy you. Again, story’s not a very important part of a mech game, but everything is handled so lifelessly and insincerely that it’s hard to get any sense of purpose from the narrative. At its heart, it’s like the creators stripped down the story to its barest parts and revealed it for what it really was: a ruse, an excuse that the player can use to run around and blow stuff up. If that was the intent here, then mission accomplished, but it’s still kind of saddening that this kind of thing manages to get by without so much as an eye-blink or an attempt at a real plot.
Posted: 2007-03-04 09:45:32 PST