The online setup has also been greatly improved too. You can use them in the campaign as well as online and they are formidable entries to any battlefield. Once completed, a UNAC is a powerful ally or enemy. This isn’t a basic barebones system either, it’s practically a game in its own right and eclipses even games like Carnage Heart in its scope.

This allows players to create an AC and then plumb in all manner of AI commands into it. This is probably the biggest and most important addition to Verdict Day, the new UNAC AI setup. The campaign is also much more challenging, much of this is down to the all new AI as it’s really quite ferocious. Overall, you end up with a more coherent flow for the missions. Whilst you still have story and order missions of a sort, the story missions are far shorter and simpler but the order missions can be a bit more involved. With that in mind, what’s interesting is how streamlined the campaign is now. In short, Verdict Day has unified the story across sixteen years of Armored Core and done it very deftly too. In Verdict Day there are very direct references to events in For Answer as well as dovetailing with the original Armored Core games back on the PSone. Previously in other Armored Core games the lineage and backstory has been gently inferred, at least in the Japanese releases (much of this was always lost in the foreign translations sadly). Narratively there’s also a lot going on here.

The planet is also still pretty much an environmental wasteland. The world has changed quite a bit, resulting in three main factions Venide, Sirius and Evergreen Family partaking in the Verdict War. The game is set a considerable period after the events in the last game. It’s quite frankly the best mecha game we’ve played this console generation. What’s different are all the substantial low level changes as well as all new systems that sit atop them. Verdict day is a direct continuation of the previous game and utilises much of the same inherent structure, both for the expansive multiplayer but also the campaign. Titles like Master of Arena and Silent Line for instance marked the pinnacle of the previous two console generations. These games have also normally been the best of that era. Sometimes these are just general changes but occasionally they coalesce into something truly great. In the case of Armored Core’s history as a series, each major shift in functionality has met with a follow on title that polishes and improves the original setup.

Armored core verdict day dlc