It’s slim pickings as far as the mech genre’s concerned these days, but the Armored Core series is an old hand, and a welcome one at that.

This time around the mechs, canonically known as ACs, are leaner and meaner than ever. Standing only five metres tall on averege, the strategic focus has consequently been shifted back from button-mashing to group tactics and intelligent use of terrain.

There’s not much of a story to be found in this title, bar the traditional “Resistance versus the Man” trope, but there doesn’t need to be. Armored Core has always been all about finicky customisation, finding that perfect balance between death-dealing and survivability in the garage, before heading out to the killing fields. The in-game tutorials go some way to decrypting the intricacies of mech-mechanics for the uninitiated, but most recruits will probably resort to trial and error, picking up the finer nuances of 21st Century combat along the way.

 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 has been confirmed and is scheduled for release on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on November 13.

The announcement was made by publisher Acitivision on the official UK Call of Duty site, which is not accessible from New Zealand. The Call of Duty global site is yet to be updated.

According to UK site Eurogamer, Black Ops 2 will be set in the near-future during a Cold War, "where technology and weapons have converged to create a new generation of warfare".