Highlights
- Armored Core 6 brings back the beloved mech series after a long hiatus, impressing fans with its trademark combat and customization.
- The game offers complex combat and customization options, allowing players to personalize their play style, but also presents a formidable challenge.
- Armored Core 6 introduces a different approach with focused missions and intricate maps, requiring strategic thinking and careful approach to conflict. The boss battles take inspiration from FromSoftware's RPGs and provide a modern challenge.
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon ushers in the return of developer FromSoftware's legendary mech series, following a nearly 10-year absence. Since its release, Armored Core 6 has received mostly positive reviews, with many citing the title's trademark combat and customization as its greatest strengths. In the time since the series' last title was released, FromSoftware has come to be revered for its tough-as-nails RPG properties, which gave rise to the Soulsborne genre. While Armored Core 6 is not a Soulsborne, the title's gameplay, missions, and boss battles have been overhauled to present a daunting challenge to modern gamers. This overhaul, particularly to player-approach and combat, sees Armored Core 6 evolve from the classic series for a new generation.
Armored Core 6 introduces a new generation of gamers to one of FromSoftware’s oldest properties. After nearly a decade out of the spotlight, Armored Core 6 reminds fans what they loved so much about the series’ exhilarating vehicular combat. FromSoftware has updated many of the series’ best features to better fit the modern landscape, delivering complex combat and customization options. These options allow players to play to their strengths, creating an AC that best fits their personal play style. However, this advantage offered by this level of personalization is offset by a formidable spike in difficulty. Armored Core 6, despite its approachable nature, provides a challenge to even the most seasoned FromSoftware fan.
Armored Core 6 Rewards a Less-Violent Approach
Armored Core 6 features a very different approach from FromSoftware's modern RPG properties. Rather than traverse an open world, fulfilling objectives, the title continues the series' previous narrative format, tasking fans with completing a list of focused missions for a variety of military corporations. However, Armored Core 6's mission maps are much more complex than in previous entries, forcing players to rethink their Assembly and strategy with each mission that they undertake. These maps and their mission's core objectives evolve the series' traditional approach to combat.
The Armored Core series' combat and customization are its most popular features, but Armored Core 6 tasks players with carefully approaching conflict. Despite adding Repair Kits and checkpoints to the series, the title's enemies can quickly defeat the player, if they're not careful. Armored Core 6 offers player ACs a variety of strategic options, which see the player able to identify combatants through walls, catch them "unaware," or equip themselves with better boosters to completely evade some encounters.
Additionally, firing a weapon deducts earnings from their completion reward. Each mission features many more enemies than are required to satisfy their core objectives, and players are rewarded for choosing their battles wisely. However, Armored Core 6's enemies feature a similar array of options, with some, like the "Unknown Craft", being completely invisible to players until they are within a certain proximity.
Armored Core 6's Bosses Provide a Modern Challenge
Armored Core 6 is not a Soulslike, but the title's enemies, particularly boss battles, take significant cues from FromSoftware's RPG offerings. From the moment players enter its tutorial, Armored Core 6's inspirations are made apparent. The tutorial forces players through a gauntlet of fast-paced combat encounters, introducing a variety of enemies that require specific strategies to overcome. One common enemy type, which reflects the title's Soulslike inspirations, brandishes a shield and must be attacked from behind or staggered to receive damage. Once these common enemies are overcome, fans face off against a tough-as-nails tutorial boss, the AH12 HC, which must be overcome in order to unlock basic tutorials and the game's main campaign
The Armored Core series's enemies have traditionally featured near-future technologies, such as advanced helicopters, massive battleships, and enemy ACs. In Armored Core 6, bosses have evolved to better reflect FromSoftware's modern presentation style, as they feature a host of massive and otherworldly designs. One such boss, the IA-02: ICE WORM, pits players against a massive worm-like mech that emerges from the ground and writhes sporadically, dealing damage, before releasing a massive red energy field. Armored Core 6's evolved approach ushers in the series' next era, delivering a mixture of both old and new gameplay elements that ensure FromSoftware fans both old and new that the series belongs among the developer's modern lineup.
Armored Core 6 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
