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https://www.ign.com/articles/armored-core-6-fires-of-rubicon-review

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.

Get in the Robot

One of the things that I appreciated right out of the gate in Armored Core 6 is that I was able to pick up the controls extremely quickly. Its all very intuitive: Right and left triggers fire your right and left arm weapons, right and left bumpers fire your right and left shoulder weapons, X jumps, square dodges, circle toggles your booster jets, clicking in the left stick makes you go into a sprint-like assault burst mode, and clicking in the right stick changes your lock-on mode.

Ive seen a lot of discussion from longtime Armored Core fans who are not happy about there being a hard lock-on system, with the argument that it lowers the skill ceiling, but I think From Software has found a really delicate balance with it. If you turn on the targeting-assist mode you gain the advantage of keeping the camera fixed on a specific target, but youre less accurate with your shots.
As a result, I found myself switching between the two modes frequently using the targeting-assist mode so I wouldnt lose track of a fast-moving boss, and then switching it off and manually keeping it in my sights when I felt like It was time to counter-attack. Having the hard-lock also allows for some really dynamic and intense boss fights that wouldve been much more frustrating to deal with if I didnt have a way to always keep the boss in my sights.

More than anything, though, combat in Armored Core 6 just feels good. The wide assortment of weapons all feel satisfying in their own way, whether thats using a charged shot from a linear rifle on an unaware enemy to kill them in one shot, nimbly dashing around with dual shotguns and laying waste to a whole military base, or juggling quad rocket launchers between your arms and shoulders. Things can feel downright anime-like at times with how many missiles youre able to fire at once and with how many missiles get fired at you.

In addition to the regular missions, theres an arena mode that pits you against steadily increasingly difficult one-on-one fights against named ACs, each with their own unique loadout and assembly. Youll definitely want to go through them too, as completing arena fights rewards you with currency you can use to strengthen your mech and further customize your playstyle. You could increase your damage with a specific type of weapon, increase your defense, unlock core abilities like a super-satisfying kick out of your assault boost, and much more. Better still, you can respec at any point for a fairly modest fee. If you wanna test your arena skills against actual humans, you can do that as well, in both 1-on-1 and 3-on-3 online matches. I didnt get to test out the netcode extensively in my review period, but the few matches that I did play were super smooth and a ton of fun.

And of course, if cosmetic customization is your thing, theres a ton of options to paint your mech whatever color combination you desire, place a variety of decals you unlock through arena fights, create your own custom decals, then save and share your creation with the rest of the world.
Beating Fires of Rubicons campaign unlocks a New Game+ mode that allows you to take all of your unlocked parts through the story missions again from the very beginning. Theres also a lot of incentive to play through NG+ in the form of multiple endings, new story branching points, entirely new and more difficult missions, and even a whole new set of arena matches to fight through. Needless to say, youll definitely want to go through this more than once to get everything that AC6 has to offer.

Verdict

Armored Core 6 doesnt look to reinvent the bipedal legs of the mech action genre, but it does update, refine, and polish them to an aggressive shine. Every sortie is a satisfying combat puzzle to solve thanks to fantastic mission design, intense boss encounters, an extremely wide assortment of weapons and parts that can dramatically affect how your mech plays, and excellent, explosive combat that manages to take very complex systems and mechanics and make them easy to understand and execute. Its interesting premise is stifled by bland storytelling told through mission briefings and radio chatter, but this is still nonetheless a welcome return of a classic mecha series.

https://kotaku.com/armored-core-6-review-elden-ring-souls-rpg-fromsoftware-1850765780

Its 3:30 a.m., my palms are sweaty, my heart is pounding, and a small mech riding on a tank blows me up for the 11th time. The rubber nubs on my controllers thumbsticks had started rubbing off long ago, but now theyre completely decimated. The PS5 DualSense was not built for this. Armored Core VIs demanding tactics focused on simultaneous movement and gunfire mean that at any point you could be pressing and executing multiple actions at once, and are often called on to chain them in quick succession. The results are sometimes messy, but more often than not equal parts exhilarating and exhausting.

By the end of Armored Core VI, Id betrayed everyone Id known. It was lonely, standing atop a giant aircraft carrier city in a distant star system ravaged by brutal conflicts that began well before Id arrived and would continue long after I was gone. It was also thrilling, knowing what Id overcome to get there and the choices Id made along the way to become something deadlier than anyone whod ever tried to get in my way. Armored Core VI is very special. I havent played a game like this in a long time.

How does multiplayer work?
Armored Core VI features online multiplayer including 1v1 and 3v3 fights. I havent been able to test it enough for the purposes of this review, and will cover my impressions of it in a seperate write-up once the mode is live for everyone following the games launch. But Im pretty excited to be playing this game for a long time.

There have been over a dozen sequels, expansions, and spin-offs in the years since the first Armored Core was released on the PS1 in 1997. Though each tinkered with the basic formula, speeding up the action or slowing it down, leaning into the sci-fi dystopian lore or pulling back from it, prioritizing single-player campaigns or doubling down on online multiplayer, the series has, in the West at least, often been treated with something between grudging admiration and quizzical disregard.

After FromSoftwares Dark Souls games took off for their radical reinterpretation of the fantasy action-RPG genre, Armored Core continued to struggle. Despite dramatically improving on its muddled, multiplayer-centric predecessor, 2012s Armored Core V: Verdict Day was largely dismissed as another ugly rehash of an impenetrable formula. Now the series is back after 10 long years, and a whole lot has changed. But in some ways Armored Core VI feels very much the same, and I hope people might finally be ready for it. I certainly am.

Out August 25 on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is a game about engineering power out of chaos and learning, first as theory and second through practice, the complex relationships between a hundred different components so that you can eventually reach for the right one for the right job in a particular moment without even thinking about it. You pilot an Armored Coredeveloper FromSoftwares bespoke term for giant freaking robot. This means flying around a mix of grim sci-fi ruins and dazzling atmospheric skies swinging big laser swords and shooting massive guns.

It also means spending an equal amount of time meticulously optimizing performance by swapping out individual pieces, each with a stat sheet long enough to put your average Final Fantasy hero to shame. The hangar where this all happens is called the Assembly, and its a set of menus that act as glorified spreadsheets documenting how each part youve collected will slightly alter the performance of your Armored Core.

This requires choosing a strategy based around the legstank treads or hovering spider octopus legs, sturdy supports or springy reverse-jointsand building out from there, making sure to balance your loadouts overall performance with the weight and energy demands of each individual piece. Its completely overwhelming until its not, at which point you feel like Matt Damon scribbling formulas on the chalkboard at MIT in the middle of the night.

For all its initial complications, theres something tenaciously old-school about Armored Core VI. In many ways its a very traditional Armored Core game, but the qualities that make it onearcadey action, limited progression systems, minimalist presentationare the very same characteristics that make it feel like an emphatic rejection of most contemporary gaming trends. Theres no crafting or random busywork, no open-world maps littered with extraneous icons to clean up.It makes Armored Core VI feel streamlined and uncluttered, fantastic at what it does and completely uninterested in everything else.

Playing as an unnamed mercenary who never shows their face or utters a word, I bypass the orbital defenses of the distant planet Rubicon to take part in a resource war over a rare, potent, volatile substance called Coral. Its essentially space oil, promising a high-tech revolution and untold carnage wherever its found. It was responsible for an environmental disaster that engulfed much of the planet half a century ago, but its reemergence has ignited a bloody race between off-world corporations, interstellar governments, and local liberation movements. The perfect playground for 100-ton mechs that rocket through the air and hit like freight trains.

My handler Walter calls me 621, a reference to the number of biologically altered test pilots who came before mewhile my rivals call me hound, an indictment of my lack of freedom and imagination. A hired gun would at least get to choose the contracts they take. Mine are given to me by people who know better, or at least more than theyre telling me. I get pitched an offer, digest the mission briefing, and then tinker with my mech until Im satisfied it will be good enough to get the job done while still allowing me room to experiment with an ever-growing menu of machine guns, missile launchers, armored joints, battery packs, and thrusters.

What begins as glorified gig worktaking dirty jobs for competing corporations to worm my way into their trust and confidenceeventually embroils me in a geopolitical conflict that has no winners, just survivors who make it to the next round. Progressing in Armored Core VI means becoming one of them, climbing past a roster of other ambitious careerists, social outcasts, and psychopaths until my arrival on any given battlefield sends NPCs screaming into their comms for backup. One of Armored Core VIs bleaker lessons is that it almost never comes.

The story is told sparingly, dotted across brief conversations over the radio and lore entries tucked away in a few collectibles and menu descriptions. Its simple, but full of texture and nuance. The corporations want to pay you to help them mine another planet to extinction. A faction of Rubiconians believe the Coral has a deep connection to humanity that goes beyond fuel and want you to aid them in their fight for freedom. Everyone is at the mercy of forces larger than themselves, but the mechs leave open the possibility that even one person can rewrite their fate, and the planets.

I was perpetually intrigued despite it always keeping me at arms length. Distrust and alienation are a feature in Armored Core VI, not a bug, and it does a superb job of conveying the seductive but eerie appeal of traipsing across desolate cities and arctic tundras just so you can light up whatever you find with a dozen high-impact bazooka shells. On the ground, Armored Core VI can occasionally look awkward in its toy model proportions, but when it takes to the skies it offers some breathtaking sci-fi backdrops and evocative environments. Exploring their intricate visual details thanks to the games robust verticality helps bridge the gaps in its otherwise sparse script.

Armored Core VI nails a certain synth-infused post-apocalyptic vibe, but its the combat and especially the boss fights that make it feel high-stakes and ripe with drama. In one early mission I take out a massive walking cannon shaped like a grasshopper in the desert. In another I survey for Coral deposits near an old mine shaft. Sooner or later I arrive at a boss fight that stops me in my tracks. First its a bulldozer shaped like a tractor trailer. Next its another mech inside spherical armor that fires so many homing missiles it feels like Im back in an ancient 8-bit bullet hell shoot em up. But Armored Core VI is not nearly so two-dimensional. Its more like Mega Man X fused with Star Fox.

I can dash in any direction, fly 1,000 feet up in the air, and fire more weapons than I have fingers to pull the triggers for. Half the battle is just remembering every option available to me at every second and deploying all of them in the most damaging and economical patterns possible. The other half is learning how seemingly minor tradeoffs in my loadout can drastically change the outcome of an encounter. Small increases to AP, your Armored Cores health, can have a big impact on survivability, while moderate increases in boost speed and energy recovering can make dodging even the most unrelenting assault of laser blasts and mechanical arms feel feasible.

One key feature Armored Core VI does borrow from Elden Ring and the other Soulsborne games (director Masaru Yamamura was a lead designer on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice) is a stagger system. Rack up enough impact damage quickly and your enemy will be briefly stunned, leaving it open to easy attacks and extra damage. Managing this meter, as well as your own version of it, can make or break fights, adding even more wrinkles to how you tinker with your mech and where you focus your situational awareness during combat.

Starting out in Armored Core VI is a lot like fumbling around in a dark, messy tool shed searching for the right size wrench. You flip the light switch on but the bulb flickers and burns out. You stub your toe on something jagged, heavy, and cold on the floor. You repeatedly run your hands over the workbench and walls hoping to catch the feel of something smooth and metallic thats just the right size and weight to maybe be the very specific thing you need in this exact moment to move forward with the task at hand.

Then you find the tool youre looking for. And then another, and another. You replace the light bulb and as you rummage through old boxes and paint cans, you begin to sort everything into its right place. Several hours and a dozen tangential errands later, youre ready to fix the faucet that broke, the tire thats flat, or one of the hundred other annoyances standing between you and your best life. More importantly, the tool shed itself is more organized, and with it your understanding of one small sliver of the obstacles and opportunities facing your corner of the universe.

If Armored Core VI was all just slamming your head against difficult boss battles, it would feel frustrating and oppressive, and get old real quick. Instead, the natural ebb and flow of the game lets you explore ghostly urban hellscapes, dunk on rank-and-file enemies, and earn extra credits in-between the tougher encounters to let off steam and build up your arsenal. An Arena mode lets you compete against every other mercenary in the game, rising up the leaderboard of notoriety and unlocking chips that can be used to acquire new customization options and stat upgrades for your machine. The game is extremely generous, except in a handful of moments when its pushing you to work hard, grow, and apply what youve learned to overcome odds that always seem impossible until you manage to surpass them with ease. These moments are quietly shocking and incredibly fulfilling.

A boss fight at the end of chapter one {the game has five) saw me facing off against the autonomous PCA craft AAP07 Balteus (everything is a mashup of alphanumeric designations and nouns that sound cool). It kicked my ass for several hours. Across multiple days, in fact. I kept trying to stick to my guns and beat the fight using a conventional build with some otherwise good weapons that catered toward the enemys weaknesses. Even once I had figured out the first phase of the fight, the second one, which brings out huge flamethrower swords, kept tripping me up.

Finally, I relented and went for a super light build. It immediately paid dividends. I managed to stay airborne higher and longer, avoiding attacks with ease and consistently getting the boss down to just a sliver of health until finally Id defeated it. The fight trained me in very specific ways to overcome the Balteus, but being open to experimentation, trial and error, and a willingness to backslide on my existing progress in pursuit of new information and strategies was what ultimately unlocked the path forward. The sheer number of variables to tinker with in each encounter, on the fly, including my own understanding of the skirmish and how to respond to it, is what makes Armored Core VI so great, and why its clear it needed to come back.

The name Armored Core is meant to distinguish the vehicles I pilot from lowly tanks, helicopters, and MTs. Unlike these fixed pieces of machinery, the core is a central chamber thats readymade to drop into any configuration you can think of, infinitely adaptable and ever evolving. Playing Armored Core VI frequently feels like reenacting your favorite anime robot sequence while looking and sounding like one of the scrappy mech suits from Aliens or The Matrix, hissing and screeching with every exploded piston and thruster boost.

The central fantasy of every FromSoftware game is pretty much the samethat through close observation and relentless practice you too can bootstrap your way to greatness, slay the dragon, save the kingdom, or solve the puzzle to unlock the mysteries of the universe. In many of the Soulsborne games this means mastering the violent gauntlet ahead of you. In Armored Core VI it means changing yourself until that death march becomes a cakewalk instead. Its a game about having faith in yourself, even when no one else does, and becoming an ass-kicking mech pilot in the process, not because it will save the world, but because its cool as shit.

Eh it's what I expected. No Armored Core game has ever been perfect. They've been from good to downright terrible. This one seems in line with that trend

They've NEVER scored this well, ever.

That isn't the praise you think it is

Eh it's what I expected. No Armored Core game has ever been perfect. They've been from good to downright terrible. This one seems in line with that trend