Its been a hot minute since the last time we were able to pile bunker an enemy mech in the face, but the team at From Software has finally returned to their roots with Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. It certainly looks and feels the part of a modern mecha action game, with gorgeous graphics, a rock-solid 60fps frame rate that never falters, and an intuitive control scheme that dramatically reduces the learning curve we had to deal with in prior Armored Core games. At the same time, its bland mission briefings and a few elements of its design feel a bit stuck in their old ways. But Armored Core 6 scores direct hits in the spots it matters the most: specifically the highly customizable, intense, and frantic mecha battles.
If theres one area where Armored Core 6 could have benefited from more modernization, its in its storytelling. The five-chapter campaign plays out almost entirely over radio conversations, PowerPoint presentation-style mission briefings, and combat chatter that is nearly impossible to pay attention to while youre fighting for your life on the mining planet of Rubicon. It doesnt help that our character is a blank slate who just does whatever theyre told, fighting on behalf of corporations, resistance forces, arms dealers, or the enigmatic Walter and his personal agenda. As a result, despite an interesting setting and premise with plenty of teases of ulterior motives and questionable loyalties, I found it hard to really connect with the story on anything beyond a pure surface level, which is a shame because one of the major ideas of Armored Core 6 is a branching storyline that has you making decisions on which faction you want to take on missions for. I just didnt really care one way or the other.
The Puzzle of Combat
However, one of the benefits of this mission structure is that its able to allow for a wide variety of objectives that each favor a different style of play, which then feeds into the excellent customization elements that make up the heart of Armored Core 6. Before you sortie into a mission, youre able to equip your mech with four weapons one for each arm and one attached to each shoulder a unique head, body, legs, generator, booster, and Fire Control System. And oh boy, are there a ton of different factors to consider beyond simply what to spend your limited money on.
There are a ton of different factors to consider beyond simply what to spend your limited money on.
The external parts of your mech all have their own weight, defensive value, AP (health), and whats known as Attitude Stability, which affects how quickly you get staggered from consecutive hits. Parts with higher defensive stats naturally weigh a lot more and require sturdier but slower leg parts in order to carry the burden, and weapons that weigh a lot require larger, stronger, and heavier arm parts.
But thats not all! Certain weapons also take a ton of energy to wield, and thus require generators that have large EN (energy) capacities in order to even equip them. But then you have to balance that with the fact that your energy regeneration could suffer, which means energy management gets much more difficult once youre actually in the mission. Before you even start making those decisions you should consider what range you expect your mech to be fighting at so you can optimize your internal parts for that role and the list just goes on and on.
That may sound like a lot, and Im not gonna lie: it is. But still, I felt like Armored Core 6 did a great job guiding me with its sorting tools and descriptive text, which made it easy enough for me to discern what parts were good for what. As long as I had the idea in my head of what kind of mech I wanted to make, it was fairly easy to bring that idea to life. Over the course of the campaign I piloted a lightweight scout with fast boosts that excelled at evasion, a medium-sized destroyer that could wield heavier weaponry without sacrificing too much mobility, and a mobile fortress outfitted with the heaviest and most devastating weapons money could buy and several in between.
What all of this customization amounts to is making every mission feel like a satisfying combat puzzle. Even though there are certainly loadouts that felt stronger than others (hello dual kinetic shotguns on a medium sized bipedal mech), there was never a one-size-fits-all solution to every mission, which is a testament to the stellar design and variety of the missions themselves. Youll never do the same thing twice. One mission had me investigating a seemingly abandoned outpost, only to be ambushed by stealth ACs that I needed to scan in order to target; another had me dropping down into an underground facility, carefully descending from platform to platform so as to avoid getting disintegrated by the laser cannon at the bottom; and another still had me infiltrating a cave to destroy a generator, which I did, and then had to book it out of there to avoid getting caught up in the resulting explosion. It kept the action fresh throughout the entirety of the 15-hour campaign and beyond.
There was never a one-size-fits-all solution to every mission.
Failing missions is part of the process, and it's something that will very likely happen to you a lot. But fortunately the checkpoint system is fairly generous, and youre given an opportunity to change the assembly of your mech after every death. This made it so that every failure came with an opportunity to assess what went wrong, and think about how I could fix it. Coming back with the right answer, whether that was simply by switching out my weapon or a more drastic revamp involving changing up my AC archetype, was always satisfying. That said, I really wish that you could also access the shop as well when you die. If you dont already have the thing you need to beat whatever youre stuck on, you have to back out of the mission, buy it, and then restart from the beginning.