Are they good? I lost interest in Front mission and I need my mech fix.
I’m quite fond of them, though the multiplayer scene has been dead for ages. I recommend the first 4 ps2 games over any of the others. They’re nothing like Front Mission, being more like 3rd person shooters.
Armored Core 2 is very well made for a ps2 launch title. It has 36 missions and a 50 man arena circuit to play through, with saves carrying over to the next game. Armored Core 2: Another Age is a bit lacking in presentation (the only interaction you have with the story is what you get from in missions, no mail or arena fights) but has an insane amount of missions (92) and secret parts.
Armored Core 3 restarts the story and tweaks the mechanics quite a bit. Saves cannot be carried over from the previous games. It has 50 missions, an arena mode and a new “EX Arena” mode, 2 v 2 battles where you and an ai controlled AC fight 2 people from the main arena. This version supports 4 player vs and has coop missions, but the US version doesn’t have network support and newer ps2s lack the firewire port used for direct connections.
Silent Line: Armored Core is the expansion to AC3. It has fewer missions (34), but they tend to be longer with lots of secrets and there are incentives for doing very well on them (some parts unlock only for S ranking certain missions, others require you to go above and beyond that). Silent Line has one of the largest parts lists of any AC game, providing lots of customization options.
Armored Core: Nexus and its descendants put me off the series for a while. Nexus made heat a major issue that dominates AC design to the point where anything besides light ACs with incredible cooling are unusable. I never really got past that issue. The first expansion to it, Armored Core: Nine Breaker, is nothing but a series of pointless obstacle courses and a versus mode, with heat toned down slightly. The final ps2 AC game, The Last Raven, has a near vertical difficulty curve and a time limit.
Armored Core 4 on the ps3 suffers from missions that are WAY too short. You can often end the earlier missions in under 30 seconds with starting gear. I’ve heard that 4 Answer is better, but I haven’t played it.
The psp entry, Armored Core Formula Front, plays nothing like the rest of the series. You’re the manager of a team of arena pilots and the AI does all the fighting.
I asked because I want them for my psp, and you can’t have ps2 games on psp.
They’d be pretty much impossible to control on the psp. I don’t know how they’re handling the psp port of AC3, but the controls pretty much require 4 shoulder buttons and the later ones need 2 sticks.
You can use the analog stick for shoulder buttons.