Good
On the other hand, key flaws will prevent anyone but AC regulars getting the most out of the experience, not the least of which is the absence of any narrative to hold the action together. Extreme Battle has a coherent flow, but it eventually feels as mechanical as the droids themselves, since it is just a series of league battles that pit you against other AI teams in a bid for superiority. This simple structure drops an indisputable barrier between the game and the player, though some of this gap is bridged with the breathtaking number of ways to customize your warriors. You begin with five mechs of various attributes, although it's unlikely by the time you finish that they will even remotely resemble their original states. Units are comprised of over a dozen disparate parts, all of which come together to make a unique piece of engineered artistry. Even without a story, you will grow fond of your mechs, since the majority of your playtime is spent tweaking them, and the brawls will keep you on the edge of your seat as a result.
A lot goes into creating these behemoths, far more than initially meets the eye. Your basic stats consist of attack power, defensive power, mobility, energy, cooling, and countermeasure resistance. Developing those statistics, however, is a mind-bending trip through heads, cores, generators, arms, legs, weapons, and plenty more. Not only are your basic strengths determined by your choices of components, but they intertwine together in complex ways that take into account such things as energy usage, cooling needs, part weight, weapon range, missile lock-on type, etcetera. Furthermore, each piece of the pie can be further tuned to meet your needs. For example, your arms may have built-in weaponry, which presents different customization options from more standard arms - or from arms with built-in blades. There are also slots for optional parts, such as shields, countermeasures, and radar enhancements, all of which have further effect on your success in battle. As you can imagine, building mechs is tricky, time-consuming, and satisfying, particularly when the end result is a nail-biting rematch against a foe that you defeated in an earlier battle. You also have some skin-deep modifications at your disposal, such as colors, textures, and team symbols. The symbol creation tools are hard to get used to but do a decent enough job at allowing you to modify an existing symbol or create one from scratch.
Once you've developed a bot to your liking, it's time to send it into one-on-one battle. There are two quite disparate ways of doing so: AI controls and manual ones. Beginners and tactical types will normally go with the AI combat, which functions more as a strategy game than it does an action game. Your mech's head has a certain number of slots for the tweaking of artificial intelligence, so not only do you set base characteristics regarding actions and movement, but you can allocate performance points to specific areas like attack strength, terrain analyzing, and more. The meat of this mode, however, is your AI operations center, which lets you assign an intelligence chip to any 30-second partition of your three-minute battle. As you progress up the ranks, you will earn more of these chips, which can only be assigned to a single mech at any given time. These chips ascribe highly specific tasks to your bots, such as usage of particular weapons or clear-cut defensive maneuvers. Once you gauge your opponent, equip your bot with appropriate parts and allot the right AI settings, throw it into the ring to see how you did.
