Can you defeat “Nine Ball?” Are your mech building and piloting skills up to the task of becoming the “Nine Breaker?” Has the title of the game got you convinced that your mech will be standing in a pool hall all day trying to decide what cue and chalk combination would work best? Well, spend a few hours with this installment of the Armored Core series on the PS2, and you may end up wishing they had taken the Cores in a billiard tournament direction rather than this shining example of how not to have fun with giant, customizable mechs. The game ends up being an exact parallel of a high school metal shop class. Players will spend a great deal of time banging together metallic parts in an attempt to construct something that will ultimately fall short of the original idea. Even though they may succeed at completing the project, the final outcome will be completely devoid of celebrations and fanfare. Yes, dear gamers, Armored Core: Nine Breaker is the “C-”of mech combat.

Players can select between two choices of gameplay: training and arena. Training mode seems designed to familiarize novice players (or even some advanced players) with the ins and outs of controlling one of these things by throwing approximately 150 “training” exercises at them, each one focusing on a certain aspect of gameplay (defending, maneuvering, weapons, etc). What actually ends up happening is a lot less “training” and a lot more “sleeping” as this mode alternates between boring and needlessly frustrating. One of the main issues stems from the fact that the series’ entire “thrust” is for players to be able to design and modify their mechs any way they see fit, and if they have a specific part on their mech that is not really well suited to the training exercise at hand they’re going to fail it every time. This lackluster game design is compounded by the fact that both the game’s manual and on-screen presentation is almost completely devoid of any help, guidance, or even detailed item descriptions. For a game that hands you over 400 interchangeable parts for your mechs (without earning them), not giving any details as to how adding a specific part will affect your gameplay turns the whole process of tweaking your mech into a giant, time-wasting trial-and-error session. (The tool for configuring cores sports a set of numbers that only veterans of the genre are going to grasp from the outset.) Beginners will immediately be dealing with how “not fun” the game can be, and are likely to shut it off rather than try to eke out any enjoyment or fun that potentially lay buried underneath all the scrap metal.

In the Arena mode, players will take their outfitted mechs to task against a ladder of opponent robots. Each victory earns players points that bring about higher ranks and classes, eventually leading to the top tier of opponents and then king. Between each match is a lot of mech tweaking and adjusting, and then back to the arena. The last two sentences pretty much describe the entire range of gameplay this title has to offer, as mech-tricking and ladder climbing to victory is all there is to it. Players will be dueling inside approximately twenty different closed-off arenas against various cores. The strategic element to the game consists of players analyzing the type of setup the opponent has and then loading up your own mech with weaponry and ordnance designed to counter it. Depending on the arena, there may also be various large objects to take cover behind and use as a “strategic enhancement.” Players do have to watch their loadouts during battle, as well as ammunition and power levels. There is no online multiplayer in the game at all, but there is system-link support and split screen play.

Considering the “climb the ladder and be king” nature of the title, there’s very little whiz-bang or ballyhoo associated with victory. The mechs are graphically adequate and their HUDs aren’t overly complicated. Everything has a decent enough presentation to it, but nothing that is supposed to jolt (bangs, explosions, damage, and weaponry firing) really delivers, leaving everything that explodes with the visual presentation of a cherry bomb going off inside them. Yay.

The rest of the presentation varies from “ok” to underwhelming. The music goes, for the most part, unnoticed and the sound effects only do what they’re supposed to do. There’s really nothing about the title’s presentation that screams “artistic,” or even conveys the sense that the developers were proud of what they were creating or that they enjoyed a single minute of it. Even when one becomes “King,” the game treats the players achievement as something… incidental. The packages offered in the past with prior installments (Armored Core: Nexus) had better presentations and were, somehow, more fun to play.

Fans of this series may find something to like about Nine Breaker. It literally strips away everything superfluous and just leaves the mech building and combat. For those who already know what they are doing and what all the weird numbers signify this might be a ripping good time. Those who may be younger in age or looking for some sort of PS2 equivalent to MechAssault are going to be sorely disappointed.