It's a sixty-feet tall, seriously armoured killing machine, with a cannon on one shoulder and a missile launcher on the other. Holstered machine guns are set on each leg, with boosters equipped for fast-paced chases and shields ready to deflect heavy fire. It's got a plasma sword too, for hand-to-hand melee should my metal mammoth run out of precious ammo. An evil skull has been carelessly painted on its chest, to give that rough appeal - you certainly wouldn't want to walk down a dark alley with this thing lurking in the shadows. Not that it could do much lurking, because it is pretty huge when all's said and done, and I made the mistake of colouring it bright yellow too. There's not a lot my bot can't do - except make coffee and warm up my food.

Unfortunately, the levels in Armored Core 4 are over so fast that you could put your Micro Chips in the microwave, fire up the coffee machine, play though a level and come back for a fresh brew and some tasty junk food - and it would all still be piping hot. There's a lot to be said for a game that is easy to pick up and play, but the fact of the matter is that Armored Core 4 isn't that easy to get into, yet the length of the levels tell different story - that it should be a fast-paced, fun arcade game. A lot of in-game work for a small amount of playing time is the core problem here.

The road to battle is a long one in Armored Core 4. You must plough through briefings, you must make sure your mech is equipped with all the right things to face the next level, and you'll probably find you can kill a good hour customising your robot with loads of new parts, from weapons to armour, and colours to decals; the customisation here is as deep as I was expecting, although it can be a little confusing at times, especially when it lets you equip parts you don't have and then asks you for the money when you're just about to save your creation - only to find out that the new paint job stripped you of all your cash and you have to put all your parts back! I felt like a kid in a toy shop, filling my basket with everything I wanted - LEGO, Action Men, Transformers, and then being told that I could only have the 99p jigsaw puzzle. Denied!

After you've built your robot and built yourself up to playing a nice epic metal battle, you select a mission and you're thrown into the middle of a battlefield. The radar-map catches your attention, as you see a large map with a small red square drawn in the middle. Dare to step outside that line? You are leaving the battle area, the game warns. And if you go any further, it's game over for you! So here's a potentially great game, ruined by four invisible walls. I wanted epic-scale robot wars on rooftops and in fields of wheat! But instead I get that claustrophobic feeling in a next generation game, and I'm just not used to it - and I don't intend to get used to it, either.

The gameplay itself is quite good on the whole. Battles are enjoyable, there's always some type of objective and flying around firing rockets at other mechs is jolly good fun. Fortunately there's no slowdown, something I experienced a lot in a similar game on the PS3 - Mobile Suit Gundam. The controls are brilliant, as there are a lot of moving parts on one of these complex robots, but it's a joy to use the Xbox 360 controller to make everything work, switching weapons with ease, locking onto enemies, boosting about and wreaking havoc - all at the same time. Some missions take you away from open-air battlefields and into warehouses for a more closed and intense battle, or even into space for some rather unique looking fights. Of course, you can't expect any mission to last longer than ten minutes before it's back to the drawing board, and back to the major distraction that is customising your mech.

The graphics are one of Armored Core 4's stronger points; the explosions look immense and you can make small craters with some of your heavier weapons, which is nice. Expect to be able to knock down skyscrapers with careless fire too! Boosting at light speeds looks and feels brilliant, and the normal flying booster lights your mech up orange, as flames emit from many openings in its body. When you change weapons, each robot has an animation - so when you're going from hand weapon to shoulder weapon, pressing a button on the controller switches your weapon, but not before you see the rocker launcher come down from the shoulder and into your robot's reach. The sound doesn't really make much of a lasting impression - not musically at least - but it is there, and it does fill in silences that I couldn't bear in a game like this. If you spend more time customising than fighting then you're going to hear more beeps than sounds of metal colliding, but loud audio effects for every weapon leave you feeling like you are in control of something really big.

The online multiplayer for up to eight players is pretty good for a while and shooting at buddies in small arenas is just as much fun as the single player, but there's no sense of community and it's often difficult to find a game - so the online feeling is quite an empty one, unfortunately. Only a handful of deathmatch modes are available - One Vs One, Two on Two and Four on Four. It's a shame you can't have a massive eight player every man for himself brawl, or that you can't have four teams of two. Capture the Flag, Territories and Assault modes would also have been great fun too - still, I guess we should just be happy that there is at least some kind of online interaction, even if it isn't what it could have been. One very cool feature is that you can swap bot schematics with friends and foes, so you can try out their robots and they can try out yours!

Armored Core 4 wears too much armour for a very small core. Thirty missions that are over before you know it - that's the core - and you have to keep messing around with your robot before you move onto each mission, which means that you could well spend more time in the garage than you do on the field. Don't get me wrong, I love building my weapons up from scratch, but I'd have sacrificed the depth of customisation for better, more open-ended gameplay. Most people who buy and play Armored Core 4 will undoubtedly love it for a short while, but when the realisation that the game is almost over and you've hardly played it sinks in, you could well be returning it faster than you can complete one of these missions. And that's bloody fast!

Reviewed by Dexter Pearson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).