“You were totally out of line. You are going overboard.”

Welcome to Memory Slot, where I’m gonna tell you if old games are good.

Is Armored Core good? Yes.

Is it worth playing in 2026 over the tons of other entries and ten trillion other mecha games?
Let’s talk about it.

1997

Armored Core was very far from being the first mecha game, and it had a lot of
competition – especially from heavy hitters at the time like MechWarrior – and did it
compare back then?

I don’t know, I was born in 2006, and I haven’t played MechWarrior.

From my research, Armored Core was very well received when it came out, even compared
to other games in the genre, it was the first game that came out after King’s Field III, which I
also haven’t played, but unlike MechWarrior, I actually intend to at some point.
However, enough about the reception of the time, I want to talk about how it holds up today.

Gameplay

So, while I do love to own the actual old consoles and play the games on them, I didn’t
want to break my wallet buying a PS1 and a copy of Armored Core (those things get
expensive)

I opted to play Armored Core via the Playstation emulator program Duckstation, which I
highly recommend.
The second disclaimer I need to make is that via Duckstation, I edited the controls, and
those original controls are what I will bring up as a concern for anyone returning to the
earlier parts of the series.

Armored Core has some absolutely abysmal controls, even for the time. Looking up and
down with the triggers was something I absolutely could not get down. So, what I did was I
went into the controller editor in Duckstation, and I altered the controls to be more like
Fires of Rubicon.

This guy on Reddit is the guy who actually did it, I just followed his guide, which I also
recommend.

Once you get past those controls, though, the rest of the game is actually extremely fun
and addictive, in a very similar way that VI is.
It pretty much has an identical gameplay loop, that is to say, go on missions, get money,
buy parts to customize your AC, go on more missions – which, in my experience, was
insanely fun even for a game this old.

The actual in-mission gameplay isn’t that different from VI either, although it is naturally a
bit primitive by comparison. Your AC isn’t quite as mobile, but you do have a booster that
runs on a cooldown, and especially if you have a heavier AC, you end up not really walking
much, just using it as a brief cooldown for the boosters.

Additionally, there is no lock-on like we’d expect from modern games, instead, you have
this targeting reticle that you have to point at your enemies to aim at them, but in some
cases, it gets turned off or jammed and you must rely on your own giant robot crack shot
skills.

When I first got into the game, I was genuinely surprised to see how many features that are
in VI that were still here all the way back to the first entry. The shop was the same, as was
the assembly, the painting options were a bit more limited. You’re only able to select a
pattern and three or four color options, but that still leaves plenty of room for
customization. Here’s my endgame AC, BETA-DECAY.

[You can’t actually give it a name that long, I had to settle for B-DECAY]

The greatest “old game difficulty” that Armored Core presents, though, is DEBT.
Yes, indeed, debt in the original Armored Core is almost as scary as it is in real life.
If you aren’t careful, you can very quickly spend more on a mission than you get back, and if
you fail missions, you only go deeper into debt.
I didn’t ever actually get super far into debt, because I made a point to save before every
mission. You could argue that’s save-scumming, but I like to have fun.
Ultimately, I barely even needed to, once you get a feel for the weapons and the gameplay,
you don’t really die that often — unless it’s one of the weird missions.

One thing you figure out pretty early on is that unlike ballistic weapons, energy weapons do
not cost you anything to fire, and as far as the “meta” of the game is concerned, using
energy weapons is a very efficient cost-saving measure, especially with how overpowered
some of them are.

I was using, for most of my playthrough, the KARASAWA, which is a laser rifle, and from my
reading it’s something of this game’s equivalent to Halo’s noob combo with the LS-99
Moonlight (which I also picked up). It’s balanced in that both of those are weapons you find
hidden in levels rather than just buying with a lot of money.
The difficulty can spike here and there, but it’s similar to VI in how you have to take new
complications in your stride and be prepared for anything.

What I will say in regards to difficulty spikes, though, was the final level. It has a very
difficult boss enemy that I barely got away from with my life. I would even say it was maybe
a little poorly implemented, when you’re facing a very strong enemy AC in this game, you do
start having to fight the UI a little bit, the AC can start to feel sluggish.

Story

So, narratively, Armored Core is quite interesting because even back then, From Software
presented their stories in a way that you kind of had to piece them together rather than
being directly told what’s going on. You get the idea that you’re in some kind of post
apocalyptic cyberpunk setting after a while — but it takes some time and attention to get
there because of the abstract nature of the game’s graphics.

The game has this very dreary vibe throughout, and the atmosphere claws at your chest
while you play. I’ve heard Armored Core VI’s story described as “subtle horror” and I think
that’s a great way to describe this one as well. Unlike Armored Core VI, though, there is one
level at which the horror is considerably less subtle. That level came totally out of left field
and scared the piss out of me, no spoilers, but it’s freaky as hell.

Conclusion

Armored Core is a fantastic game, and I’m finding more and more that the PS1 had a lot of
those. It is expectedly primitive for a game released in 1997, but it holds up surprisingly
well. If you’re the kind of player that can handle a little bit of early video game jank, I highly
recommend checking it out. Maybe change up the controls, though.

SCORE: 8.5/10.