I’ve beaten Daemon X Machina! I wasn’t initially too keen on it but after everything I’d say it’s a worthy successor to Armored Core-with a few rough edges I hope they polish for the hopeful sequel.
-Gamefeel is good. The default control layout make sense, flying around and shooting at things feel decent. Not being able to really fly down feels strange at first but there’s a part for that if you can’t get used to it.
-There’s a good variety of mission objectives and environements. Protecting things, escorting, destroying things, fighting bosses (who are good successors to the Arm Forts from Armored Core For Answer - though I didn’t like the sword golem because he’s such a bullet sponge). Some missions and secret objectives can even get fairly creative, whcih brought to mind the ps2 generation of Armored Core in a good way.
-The customization is reasonably deep. Different arms are noticeably good (and bad) at different things and there are a lot of stats to keep track of. But it’s still a lot simpler than Armored Core - for example, there’s no different leg types. Also beside making a minor adjustment for the fina lboss, I never felt like the game tried to push me in a specific build for a specific mission. if you’re a halfway competent architect, you can play the game how you like.
-I played the game entirely during bus rides from works so I appreciated the decision to make missions very short. It was a good fit for the switch.
-There’s a lot of stuff in there. Doing the main campaign and all optional missions took me 15 hours with some very slight grinding for parts and I’m not anywhere close to having done all secret ovjectives and collected all weapons. The procedurally-generated dungeon missions they introduced in a patch are a lot of fun and I can see the game keeping people busy for a long time.
-Being able to play as the pilot once your mech is destroyed is neat in theory (and it did save my ass once when a mission ended one second after I popped out of the hatch), but you’re so defenseless even when upgraded there’s basically no way you’re getting a clutch win against enemy mechs, and only two missions require you to be on foot (which I don’t mind, because Outer gameplay isn’t particularly fun). Honestly I’d rather have just the skill tree be all for your mech.
-The game throws a lot of mechanic at you and forget about them. There’s a mission where you control a boss, and then never again. There’s a mission early on where you can position bomb to help you defend a position, and then you never do anything like this again, etc.
-The story is a mess. The setting and the faction you work for are never properly explained. Everyone is an one-note hammy stereotype. Characters make these Important Speeches full of buzzwords and act very strangely and stupidly (there’s a plot point of the mercenaries being pitched to fight each other in bogus mission requests and then they decide to fight eachother anyway to find… something). Nobody does anything about the extremely obvious villain. Plot threads are brought up once and then never again, plots developments that should be important are infodumped in optional emails without being properly contextualized etc etc.
There’s a part late in the game where one of the faction send an emails among the lines of “The black AI and regular AI are fighting each other also our saboteur team is stuck in cyberspace WE ARE ALL DEAD AND WE ARE SENDING SHUTTLES TO ESCAPE THE INVISIBLE WALL WISH US GOOD LUCK”. It just feels a big pile of wut because none of the things they tell you about are properly established or reflected in the missions you do. It’s actually somewhat similar to how the PS2 Armored Core games handled exposition through their e-mail but somehow they did it much better.
