Ditto Gran Turismo or Sim City or any other game that lets you build something and call your own - when you've finally built that big bitchin' tank-treaded robot with the giant missile pods and the massive pulse laser and the Corvette-red paint job with your own custom logo, you can sit back in your easy chair and think "I made that!" It's a great feeling, and it doesn't hurt that AC2's graphics are more than sharp enough to do your imagination justice.
What the game and the experience trips over, every so often, is how difficult it can be to realize the other half of the dream, to take that mech onto the battlefield and raise all the hell you know it can. From Software has stubbornly refused to change with the times, holding on to their games' original control system in the face of obviously superior alternatives, and that brings down the fun of the game twice over - I was aggravated by what it is, and aggravated some more by the knowledge of what it could be.
Even so, Armored Core 2 packs so many options and so many missions and so much ability to create that I can't ignore how much it does well, even if I can't escape my misgivings about its control scheme. There's a vast amount of fun to be had with this game, even if you have to pry it from its grasp some of the time.
Graphics
While the structure of AC2's look is still the same as the earlier Cores, this is the ultra-sharp, 60FPS, steroid-injected successor to those somewhat drab creations. It's not nearly as flashy overall as the Five Star Stories-esque Frame Gride, and the backgrounds are often very utilitarian, but the real stars, the giant robots, have not ever looked better. They're big, smoothly rendered with plenty of polygons, they're detailed, clothed in sharp high-resolution textures, and they shine in the light of From's graphical effects, exploding missiles and glowing energy weapons.
While a number of missions take place in rather empty environments, as I said, you will occasionally come upon a battle that takes place in a genuinely interesting arena. More crowded, urban environments may make getting around a bit of a pain (more on that later), but you can still enjoy the nicely-designed futuristic cityscapes, and best of all, you can blow up large amounts of the scenery. If your opponent is ducking behind a small enough building, a flight of MIRVs is usually more than enough to destroy his cover and do him some damage. In outdoor environments, meanwhile, whatever you think of the level of detail, the draw distance is always excellent.
Most missions are bookended by cinemas that may look a little perfunctory (they're never visual stunners), but they do provide a pleasant lead-in to the action proper. Every so often you're also treated to a dash of pre-rendered FMV, which looks absolutely lovely - just like the introduction, which rivals the classic Gun Griffon movies.
Sound
From the rattle of shoulder-mounted Gatlings to the whoosh of a flight of missiles taking off, AC2's sound effects do a great job of conveying the impact of weapons and movement. The measured stomp-stomp-stomp of legged mecha or the whoosh of hover-equipped cores, meanwhile, calmly marks the time during missions.
What deserves the most respect out of AC2's audio elements, though, is the voice acting, curiously enough. Agetec (sorry guys, but I do get it right in the end) has done a remarkably good localization job, which is the last thing I would have expected from them, given how small they seem to be. They're aided, no doubt, by the lack of lips to synch any of their voices to, but that doesn't take anything away from the quality of their work. The corporate fixers who dole out your missions are suitably officious, sleazy, or chirpily helpful, while fellow Ravens speak in gruff, clipped tones like the hard-bitten old mercenaries that they are.
Gameplay
I would like to speak directly to From Software at the moment. Are you gentlemen listening? Good. Find a Dual Shock controller and hold it in your hands. Do you feel those two little mushroomy things that land right under your thumbs? Do you see how they smoothly move in any direction, letting you exert a variable degree of pressure? Those two things are called "analog sticks," and they are a marvelous advancement in the area of movement and aiming control when implemented in a game such as yours.
Unfortunately, you've decided to stick to the outmoded digital-pad controls of your previous games - movement on the D-pad, strafing on the upper shoulder buttons, and vertical aiming on the lower shoulders. The job of these eight buttons could have easily been assigned to the analog sticks instead, allowing greater precision of movement with only two fingers instead of three or five, and this would have the wonderful side effect of freeing up more digital buttons to perform other useful functions, as well as freeing up your attention to focus on managing your weapons and jump jets.
But no, Armored Core 2 has dragged its old control scheme into the new generation with it, and we gamers are much poorer for it. Every time I found myself stuck in a corner or strafed from above or being shot in the back by some bastard I couldn't draw a bead on because my turning speed was so slow, I thought "Analog! Analog! My kingdom for the analog!" But there's no analog.
You can certainly learn AC's control scheme with practice (followers of the PlayStation games should already have the knack), and the maneuverability troubles you encounter early in the game are really what the customization system is there for, but if only the game had a more friendly control system, it would be that much easier to get into the real fun of the game, blasting your enemies and building your mechs and working your way through the missions and plot. I'm all for difficulty in games, but give me an honest challenge, not one artificially created by bollixed game design.
On a layer just above gameplay proper, the progression curve occasionally leaps in bizarre directions at times. Every so often, you'll encounter a mission that demands a mech customized for a very specific application - nothing else will do.
For example, there's one mission where you have to chase a fleeing cargo vehicle down a long, straight highway. This would be simple, except that the truck is faster than almost any mech you can design, save something with the fastest possible locomotion unit and an extremely efficient booster. In any other case, you'll lose him down the tunnel and have to sit for a moment until the game decides that you've failed the mission. If you don't have the money to kit out your mech appropriately, you simply can't complete that mission.
There are other similarly problematic missions, where you need particular weapons or flight capabilities or extra-heavy armor or what-have-you and you just won't have the money to buy them. It's an irritating obstacle in your progression to encounter, especially if you wash the mission entirely, because the repairs for a destroyed mech will send you into the hole faster than four years worth of student loans.
What this means, basically, is that you'll find yourself starting the game over very often. It's easy, in the early stages, to sink yourself into debt that's too deep to escape. You lose a mission, so you're in the hole, so you can't buy new gear, so you keep failing missions, and so on. Eventually, though, you'll develop a good enough handle on the earlier missions so that you can build up a cushion in your bank account, and good enough piloting skills to complete a task without destroying your mech in the process (take too much damage and you'll see repair bills eat up all your profits).
Customization
And now, if you'll let me make the pun just once, we're at the core of this game, the mecha workshop where you can design and build your ride from the ground up. I do not have a precise figure handy on the number of core parts available in AC2, but I think I can safely say that you will not run out of stuff to try out any time soon. There are arms, legs, bodies, boosters, generators, radar, fire-control systems, and weapons galore to mix and match into thousands of different configurations. Building a mech is simple: you just pick what you like, and react according to the occasional instructions on the game's part (some configurations may be underpowered, overweight, or otherwise unsuitable). Once the whole works is together, you can test it, take it into battle, or customize its appearance, picking one of several different color schemes and even designing your own individual logo.
This is, in case I haven't brought the point home strongly enough, the best part of Armored Core 2, and the reason I'm willing to make time for its other shortcomings. You can build almost anything that you'd want to, and the catalog of parts grows ever larger as you progress through the game, giving you a great incentive to push forward into harder and harder missions. That aspect of the plot progression branches like everything else - depending on what missions you take, and which corporate sponsor you happen to ally yourself with, you acquire different parts than what you might pick up by trying a different branch of the mission tree.