Armored Core 4 Pics (Courtesy of Bepbo of GAF)

[BlueTsunami]

Very large pics, ripped the post word for word from his thread (He won't mind ). The main thing is to show you the pics from someone actually playing the game. I didn't know it was already out in Japan? Apparently it is!

Here you go!

Armored Core 4 illustrated walkthrough of an early chapter 2 mission!

Your mission is to eliminate a giant laser beam thingy that's not being friendly from the inside.



Your starting view. You see blinding sunlight and air blur from dropping down and you're like "wtf is going on!?.



Then you look down and go "oh shit the giant laser canon is below me and little sattelite lasers on the outside are shooting at me!" (note I had to pause obviously to take this since I can't really look down and take a picture with 2 hands at the same time. Pausing the game darkens the picture/colors).




I land on the top of the canon and take in my view.


I look down at the huuuuge canon I'm going to be jumping down.



The bottom.



I head through one of the tunnels and come out to a room filled with sunlight coming in through glass ceilings. Meanwhile a bunch of enemies are sliding around with sparks shooting out of their feet as they try to kill me. I stand and take a picture while losing life.



Retreating I go through another chamber and shoot out the glass cielings to reveal dozens of helicopters (all destroyable) flying around outside. The outside has a grainy military video-cam filter to it. The helis start shooting me. (the bar is the refresh rate on my tv >_<)



Standing still and taking pictures during levels is not such a great idea. I am now dead ;_;

Heres a Pros and Cons post from Bepbo

Ok, here are some pros & cons

Pros:
+Game looks really good. The levels use all sorts of filters like in those early shots to give them a cool artsy look. Some of the effects are great like the heat distortion in the desert. Animation is very good.
+Music is good.
+Game controls very nicely.
+Missions are nice and quick.
+Game is fun when you aren't dying horribly
+Lots of weapons/parts/other items to buy.
+Online is quick and easy to get working. I was in a 4 on 4 game in under 30 secs.
+You can take your 1p mech online
+When you beat certain missions you get "blueprints for cool mechs" but to make them you have to already have the parts or have enough money to make them.

Cons:
-Difficulty ramps up really fast and gets to the point where each stage is "I'm going to snap my ****ing controller in half".
-Because of this you're forced to keep replaying older levels for money to buy parts.
-You never get parts from beating levels so you have to BUY everything at HIGH prices.
-Parts are really expensive and you don't get much money per mission.
-You can't earn money in online for your 1p game.
-When you die (which happens over and over again) there is no "retry" option. So you have to go back to the mission screen, choose the mission, and load it again just to die 30 secs later after 1 min+ of loading. VERY annoying.
-With so many enemies at once, it's hard to lock onto a single one (aka if it's mission objective or laser that kills you in 1 hit)
-You can't stay locked onto enemies all that well (I hear this is an AC general flaw, not AC4 specific)
-Online is cute, but it's no Chromehounds because all it is, is short 1-5 min burts of action in a small arena. Shoot, dodge, shoot, shoot, game ends. No longterm goals, no interesting playtypes. Maybe it's fun to take your custom mech against a friend or two, but AC4 is a single player game with multiplayer tacked on.
-Did I mention you die A LOT?


Nice game, but as someone who hasn't played AC since AC1 the difficulty level is not-fun difficult by the 3rd chapter. I hear this is possibly because when the game started and you got to pick from ~10 different types of frames I picked the small and mobile one that was well-rounded in stats so my armor sucks. I may need to restart the game with a heavy mech and see if maybe it's not so goddamn annoyingly difficult. I actually wouldn't mind the difficulty since the stages are so short if I could just quickly retry...but I can't and seeing NOW LOADING for a min every 1-2 mins makes you really angry. From what I hear this is basically how AC is, so AC fans should be excited as its AC + high-speed + great graphics. People who never got into AC and it's "you gotta customize like crazy or you'll die!" gameplay, are probably just going to get pissed off. From Software needs to get ACE3 out ASAP on this engine. ACE is the perfect mech game for non-hardcore mech lovers as you don't customize much (just level up existing parts) and you just get lots of money each mission and use them to buy totally unique mechs. Chromehounds is for the slow sim-lovers, AC is for the fast sim-lovers, ACE is for everyone else. Hopefully that's their next mech game for summer/fall 2007.


And yes I like my mechs brightly colored

[Viano]

i dont think it loads lover a minute

[Sypher]

Looks like a good AC game overall. I love AC but hes right about the difficulty. +rep for you sir!

[BlueTsunami]

i dont think it loads lover a minute

Bebpo can be a little passionate sometimes. Its probably less than that.

[Viano]

♪o♪

[Kabbage]

Yay look a PS2 game.

Looks like the graphics havent been improved since AC2... again.

*Might get it just for online though *

[Raijin]

Yay look a PS2 game.

Looks like the graphics havent been improved since AC2... again.

*Might get it just for online though *

Uh what?

[Kabbage]

Uh what?

Oh wait I just read it... meh pics with a vanilla online

[Viano]

actually the graphics are great but the sometimes suffered from frame rate..

[Luis]

I would like to play this game, I hope they release a demo.

[BlueTsunami]

Yay look a PS2 game.

Looks like the graphics havent been improved since AC2... again.

*Might get it just for online though *

Are we looking at the same screens? Or is your browsing redirecting you to actual AC2 pics, because if you think those look like AC2 level visuals I suggest you bail out of Next Gen.

Also, heres another pic from Bebpo. He states that the "Haze" effect is real nice. This is a dessert environment. The sunset in the horizon looks awesome...

[frosty]

the graphics are nothing spectacular, the background of pic 3 looks like it could be rendered easily on a N64.bbut there are some areas that look really nice as well, so I'll wait to see some better quality pics.

[blackprettyboy2]

the graphics are nothing spectacular, the background of pic 3 looks like it could be rendered easily on a N64.bbut there are some areas that look really nice as well, so I'll wait to see some better quality pics.

they are screens takin with a crap cam. in his review he said the game looked great
better than chromehounds . he says it has more detail and has great colors. u cant look at screens to tell how good a game looks. gears look.

[raVen]

I thinking your forgetting exactly what n64 looked like

[BlueTsunami]

The most striking thing about this game, which allows it to look truely nextgen is the filter effects and the (what seems to be) extremely good and detailed geometry on the mech in the picture (woah that was a long sentence).

Of course, these images are probably not doing the actual games visuals justice but you can tell the filtering effects are just great. The mech itself looks detailed geometry wise (even with the pictures being blurry).

Though, unfortunately, the game is said to have subpar framerate.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

yeah just looks like bad pictures to me.