It's been a long, long time since we've seen a great mech game. Chromehounds was almost six years ago; MechWarrior was even further back. Armored Core, meanwhile, is a series that hasn't been at peak fitness for over a decade. I haven't played one of these games since the PS2, and so I came to Armored Core V with muted expectations. Happily, it has comprehensively exceeded them.

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I've seen two predominant reactions to Armored Core V . Some people spend an hour trying to figure out what's going on before dismissing it as boring, convoluted and incredibly difficult, and others sense that there's something interesting behind its unwelcoming metal exterior and commit themselves to scaling the entry barrier. In this way, and in this way alone, it has something in common with Dark Souls: you have to commit before Armored Core will show you what it's made of.Armored Core V is essentially an MMOG, structured around a giant battle for territory between mech teams of up to 20 people each. The first thing you're prompted to do is either join an existing team or create one of your own. From then on your every action contributes to the group's overall standing, improving the team's overall level and earning points that can be spent on conquering new territories. As a single-player game, Armored Core V is overwhelming, and the missions can seem endlessly repetitive. But within this massively multiplayer context, every mission and victory is infused with meaning and given variety by the larger context of your team's success, and the other people you're playing with.Perhaps unsurprisingly given From's long experience with the genre, Armored Core V nails the fundamentals of mech combat: detailed customisation, a huge range of parts, and plenty of big explosions. With a gatling gun on the left arm, a rifle on the right and shoulder-mounted missiles, plus a giant laser blade stowed away in a bay unit, piloting one of these machines makes you feel powerful. The feeling of a mech game is something that Armored Core gets just right – the industrial grime, the weight and inertia of the robots themselves, the cool-looking startup sequences and explosive, metallic sound effects.The customisation is awe-inspiring, letting you change every tiny detail and make your own emblems and decals. There's a shop full of hundreds of different mech parts that unlock gradually as you go along, from fairly normal rifles and cannons through to giant laser cannons, Howitzer missiles, defensive shields, melee weapons, boosters, tank-treads, targeting computers and much more. Changing your mech configuration completely changes the way that you play the game. It's like Forza for people who love giant robots.Each time you start the game up, you sit through a login sequence whilst the server sorts itself out, and then you're dropped straight into the world map, which shows all the missions available to you. Your team stats and mech workshop are on different blades, allowing you to switch between a mission overview, customisation menu and team data easily. You can play Armored Core's 10 story and 85-odd Order Missions by yourself, but every single one supports at least two players, and invading or defending territory in Conquest mode requires a team of 5. You can also offer yourself up as a mercenary, temporarily joining other teams and helping them out with missions.The core gameplay is fast, strategic, and varied once you get through the first sets of missions and start experimenting with different weapons and setups for your mech. Armored Core V's smaller, nimbler mechs can fit in the alleyways between buildings, forcing you to be strategic. Instead of stomping forward in a straight line and blowing things up if they get in your way, you have to look out for the laser-sights of long-range sniper mechs and approach clusters of enemies or VTs from behind, using recon darts and your mech's scan mode to scope out threats before they're upon you. Equipping different parts will completely change how you approach missions, turning you from heavy-weapons tank to nimble flying boost-jumper to quadrapedal sniper – and balancing your team's strengths is important if you're out to capture territory or take on missions as a group.What's not so great is the way that the game explains all of this – or rather, doesn't explain it. it'll explain things once, if it explains them at all, and most of the knowledge that you accumulate about how things work comes from bitter experience and poring over part descriptions in menus. This is why the entry barrier is so high: if you're new to the game, you'll probably fail a lot of missions without really knowing why, probably because your mech configuration or parts are somehow lacking. You need a team to support you and answer your questions.Armored Core V is not an easy game even if you do understand it, and it really doesn't help itself in that area. The controls aren't really self-explanatory, and the tutorial only outlines things in text pop-ups – there are no comprehensive training grounds or guides to different mech parts and how they work. There's no reason why you should automatically know that you have to be standing still and in a ready position to fire a laser cannon, or what all of the crazy statistics mean. The Story missions especially are very challenging – you have to spend many hours on Order missions earning money and building up your robot before taking them on, especially alone.The only answer is practice and repetition, which can get a bit tedious, especially on your own. Better explanations would encourage you to experiment more freely with mech configurations without fearing that any change you make might force you learn all over again through trial and error.Another significant problem at the moment is region-locked servers, which are restrictive and make it difficult to form real online communities. The European servers are rather sparsely populated at the time of writing, which makes enjoying Armored Core V at its best pretty much impossible. This is a game that relies on a good population of active players to make its whole premise work, and it'll be more difficult for the game to maintain that outside of Japan.