Review: Armored Core: Verdict Day (PS3)

Before Verdict Day, I had never played an Armored Core game. So picture, if you will, someone whose first experience of a game is a bunch of prompts to import a character from Armored Core 5, then set up a character because I selected 'no.'

Then I had to wade through all kinds of news from the Armored Core 5 world (all of which assumed some kind of knowledge of the previous game and failed to make much sense to me), and I needed to explore each and every menu to try and figure out what each meant because there were no tutorials of any kind to explain what is going on. I customised my mech without really knowing what I was doing to it, and then, being unwilling to get into the multiplayer for fear of my last 20 minutes of customisation embarrassing me, I went to what seemed like the least important part of the menu - the single player game, to play my first mission.

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Dark and gloomy can look pretty too

Dark Souls and its predecessor Demon's Souls were dark, grim affairs that led to many, many player deaths. Dark Souls II promises to offer up more of the same, and the visuals continue to impress with every new batch of screenshots that get released.

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Prepare to lose your Soul - again

Of course, the real test will come when it is time to play the game. Here everything is visually detailed and interesting, but some of the screenshots certainly help convey the sense of menace and often times oppressive atmosphere.

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