Most of the Arms Forts require you to do little more than simply fly up and pound away at them until they explode (even those with specific vulnerable points are easy to take down), with only a couple of engagements requiring any semblance of creative technique. There is a particularly cool mission that has you flying inside one of these massive beasts to take out its reactor (with a few surprises when it starts detaching pieces of itself to try and keep you away), but sadly none of the other engagements matched this sense of scale and urgency.
Despite this, the singleplayer campaign is still pretty enjoyable. The difficulty of the missions is a bit more consistent now, and the game is less prone to throwing you into challenging engagements without proper build-up first. I also like the new “V.O.B.” missions (short for “Vanguard Over-Boost”), which is a piece of gear that gives your employers an excuse to strap an oversized set of boosters to the back of your giant robot and hurl you into a long-distance battlefield, forcing you to frantically dodge incoming artillery fire until the V.O.B. is discharged and you’re close enough for conventional maneuvers. The trademark Arena matches are also still in the game, and provide an auxiliary means to gain cash and unlock additional secret parts.
But for all these nice touches, the campaign still suffers from the same damning problem that has plagued every game in the series to date: mission length. Once again, I found myself spending far more time tuning my “NEXT” (the name for the Mechs you pilot in the game) than actually playing missions, and the longest mission I played only went on for about six or seven minutes.
This is offset a decent amount by two things: One, the quantity (there are about 42 missions in total), and two, the “Free Play” mode, which lets you go back and replay any campaign mission, in hopes of getting more money and the coveted “S” ranking. This in turn can unlock even more parts for you to use, with some of them being very much worth the effort. I think a forum posting I read summed up the game’s campaign mode very nicely: You can easily blast through the set of missions in a single day, but if you do this, you’ll miss most of the game’s charm and extra content.
The “Hard” difficulty available through the Free Play mode also adds extra scripted twists and challenges to the missions, making them worth a second look. Probably the biggest boon to replayability is the blessing of a glorious co-operative gameplay mode, though this only supports two players (and isn’t available for all missions – some of the harder ones in particular don’t support this mode, surprisingly).
Speaking of multiplayer, For Answer does provide some fairly in-depth competitive multiplayer modes in addition to the co-op play, with features such as ranked matches, objective-based gameplay modes, and even a nifty little “Quick Chat” system, where you can hit certain buttons while in the lobby to send messages like “Good Game!”, or “I need to change my AC”. This is mostly a convenience for those too lazy (or jaded) to use their headset on Xbox Live, which meant it worked very nicely for my needs.
