It took rejecting everything about my education to use the Americanised spelling of “armored” to match this game’s title. The way that I was taught to spell, and the way this word is utilised in my country is “Armoured.” I made this comprimise out of respect for the product they’ve put together here.
There’s a fairly compelling argument to be made that From Software might be the most influential development studio of the millennium – as early as it is to claim that in 2023. They single-handedly popularised the “Soulslike” genre, successfully branched out into the gritty and grotesque world of Bloodborne, then took their brand of painful difficulty to the Sengoku murder-fest that was Sekiro, and most recently, worked with George RR Martin to burn their version of Yggdrasil to the ground, in Elden Ring.
Simply on the basis of developer From Software’s recent track record, you could just hold your hands up and say, Armored Core VI is probably going to be good to great too. The sixth mainline game in the AC series released on the 25th of August, 2023 for all current and last generation consoles, aside from the Nintendo Switch.
Fires of Rubicon has a fairly simple narrative. The player takes the role of a mercenary who is the pilot of an Armored Core, a customisable mech, and does increasingly difficult tasks on the planet of Rubicon 3 to make money. The whole story will take around 15-20 hours, and that’s assuming you get stuck on some encounters like I did. If you want to go for the game’s final ending, then you need to finish this three times with minor story differences in each. This pushes that playtime up into the 30 hour range. While I normally need a strong narrative to hook me, I appreciated this one being predictable and focused on driving its gameplay.
The majority of your interactions come from audio using a comm format, in dialogue with handlers or your foes. In truth, these are little more than incidental comments thrown around between missions or while you zoom your way through the bad guys. It would be wrong of me to say there is no story, and that no relationships or backstory is scattered in conversation for the player to pick up. It would be equally wrong of me to try and convince you that these are good. The way this is presented to the player is weak because there’s no shown entity talking to you, at best you get a thumbnail and a wavy line. These are bad from a storytelling standpoint, but reaffirms the fact that this game’s primary goal, lies with something else.
My best guess as to what that is… would be customising your mech. I’d been playing the game for around an hour before I stumbled across the expanded stats menu, and this was the point I knew this game was for me.
The foundation of AC’s progression is rooted in swapping parts and finding ways you can eek out extra gains, while taking the hits elsewhere. You have a great deal of customisation and that lends itself to a plethora of different playstyles.
You can try and build a good all-arounder mech that works for you, or specialise for each mission based on experience or enemy tactics. Mech weight, speed, attack power, defence and other stats all play a part in your ability to deal, avoid and take damage.
This element of customisation is strong, primarily because it creates meaningful gameplay. It’s not just cosmetic when you switch to tank treads, it actually makes you more stable but less mobile. If you switch to the enhanced legs, you gain increased jump, but have to pay more attention to the weight of your equipment, and will suffer recoil from shooting certain weapons.
How you get better in the game depends on what parts you have and how you choose to use them, and you will eventually find a play style that works for you. Mine ended up being a light/mid-weight build dual wielding shotguns. Progression here is based on acquiring COAM, this game’s currency, and purchasing mech parts, along with increasing your Arena and Hunter Ranks to unlock new ones. There are also chests on missions which you can collect too.
Fires of Rubicon’s gameplay structure is mission based, and you can replay any mission you’ve already done for a better rank or another payday. These missions feel a lot like those in Metal Gear Solid V, both in presentation and deployment. There are additional in-game modes, like the Arena, and Nest – this game’s PvP mode, but the essence of each is the same, deploy in your mech for a single level or encounter and then return to the hangar. From here, spend your money or access your rewards, rinse and repeat. If you don’t like the mech-assembly side and you’re here for the combat, then focus on doing the arena missions as this lets you unlock some preset builds to work towards.
If there’s one thing we know for certain about the usual From Software type of game is that they are purposeful, punishing and designed to be played in certain ways. Most of these games focus on cautious and defensive combat, while you learn encounters and boss patterns.
The excellence in their design is making that one calculated and predictable enemy feel like a threat or a challenge, and said challenge is designed almost exclusively under the assumption that the player will only be focusing on that target. Armored Core does that too, but often, asks the player to process a larger number of threats simultaneously, even if on occasion, they all originate from the same entity.
You can be attacked from multiple directions very easily here, from being outnumbered, to enemies that use homing or altered trajectory weapons, and the game is clearly designed to put you in that situation. The biggest difference I found, was that this emphasises constant readjustment in fights, and makes combat very fast and reactive. I like this more than I do the usual Souls-style game, which tends to punish hyper-mobility through the stamina bar. There is a similar system here too, but it’s much more forgiving, and the game encounters are designed so you can take some chip damage from light gunfire without exploding straight away. Early on, it mattered less about how I went into a fight, and more, how quickly I could respond to any new stimulus that appeared on screen. Towards the end of the game, both matter equally. You need to learn enemy patterns and their capabilities, but the crux of moment-to-moment combat is in this speed and reactive nature.
This is also one of the reasons I chose to stick with mostly mid or lightweight mechs, because I valued that manoeuvrability very highly, and my personal tactic for getting better at this game was to channel my inner Barry Allen and just get faster.
Prior to this I’d never played an Armored Core game, but these battles reminded me of those in a former PS5 exclusive – Returnal, and to a lesser extent, some of the bullet hell sections in Nier Automata. Perhaps it’s the sci-fi theming, or the glowing things that fly at you in a pattern.
The other thing those games do, and I’m thinking of Returnal in particular here, is give the player a lot of mobility. This isn’t anything new, but it matters greatly as verticality is much more relevant to the player here.
In other games, where you play a human character whose effective jump height falls into a category adjacent to realism, your primary options for avoidance are to move along the depth Z-axis (as in moving forwards or backwards), or the horizonal X-axis (strafing or side-to-side). This is usually enough, and if you do get to interact with the Y-axis, that is fairly limited, most commonly through jumping or special abilities.
Fires of Rubicon gives the player impressively free access to the Y or vertical axis, which opens up an entirely new direction the player can use to avoid mechanics we’ve usually dealt with across two. Of course, this does mean that enemies can be tailored to better deal with this, but that never stops that freedom of movement from feeling good.
Armored Core VI uses the same game engine as Elden Ring, and while that engine isn’t necessarily the best looking one, it’s very clear that From Software are good at utilising this engine to achieve their goals. This is demonstrated by this game’s impressive stability with held at a rock solid 60fps with no 99th percentile drops below 50 during missions and combat. I did encounter two instances of freezing and crashing over my time from tutorial to the NG++ ending, but these were not in combat and were during transitioning from the mission to the mission ending screen.
I also think it’s worth pointing out that the game uses sound very well, even if I didn’t really pay much attention to the music. This is a great game to put an up-tempo playlist on and just rage to, as long as you can hear the game’s audio cues, as you can dodge a lot of incoming damage without seeing it, if you pick up on these.
By that same metric, I do appreciate the clean UI design. You can clearly see the reload or cooldown on each of your four weapons without needing to move your eyes away from your target. This information is clearly provided to you.
The same can’t be said when missions end though, as the debrief screen doesn’t properly indicate what you did right or wrong to earn the ranks or payout you get. Instead you get generic overviews from “bonus pay” rather than an itemised list. I get not wanting to just dump this on your player, but this game does “score” any missions you replay, and this information would certainly be helpful for those aiming for the higher ranks.
This game knew exactly what it wanted to be and what it didn’t want to be. It makes no pretences to try and be something it’s not. It chooses two or three elements of game design and gameplay that it wants to present to the player – in this case, combat, customisation and a difficulty curve – and deprioritises everything else.
That works well, and it’s the reason this is a very good game. It’s fun, and was a nice challenge. On a personal note, I do think that my playstyle of “go faster” if you fail, works better here than it ever did against the ego-crushing Malenia in Elden Ring.
At the absolute worst, Armored Core will be something “different” that might not be “your” thing. It turns out that PvP aside, this is my thing, and the customisation, particularly the choice for gameplay affecting parts, really pushed me from intrigued, to interested and then to enamoured. It might not have that effect on everyone, but it’s well worth a try if you think shooting mechs from your own, sounds like fun, but don’t jump into this expecting to be blown away by the story.
Fatelighter 