Forrest’s Totally Official Review of Armored Core VI W/ Numerical Score Value
I could start this piece with a clever joke about how “Armored Core is back,” but it was never really “here” to begin with. Armored Core has always been a niche computer game series with a niche audience of mecha-head nerds who really like big robots, which in America is a surprisingly low number of people when compared to Japan (per capita). While it may surprise you to know that Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is actually the 259th game in the series, it never really caught on until its developer, FromSoft, made a computer game series that IGN decided was a “9/10,” whatever that means: the forever-emulated-once-in-a-lifetime-beautiful-nasty-masterpiece: Dark Souls.
For all intents and purposes, the director of Dark Souls, Hidetaka Miyazaki, turned everything around for FromSoft, which was consistently creative but not on the mental radar of the average Cheeto-stainer (that’s what we’re calling “gamers” from now on). FromSoft went on to milk the formula of Dark Souls (as is their right), including Dark Souls 1 through 4 (4 being Open World Dark Souls: Elden Ring). One got the impression FromSoft was trepidatious in their willingness to revisit any of their older series until the overwhelming success of Elden Ring pretty much allowed them to do whatever they wanted. And do whatever they wanted they did, hence: Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon.
Armored Core VI is the type of game that forum elitists will tell you is “much worse than Armored Core 4” but also “much better than Armored Core: Verdict Day” but also “a perversion of the series that you shouldn’t play” yet these same elitists are playing it non-stop on Steam in “invisible” status with “game history” turned off so you won’t know they are actually playing it non-stop in “invisible” status with “game history” turned off, a fact that they would absolutely never admit even if clear evidence was brought forward to prove it; a window into the soul of the 21st-century-gamer who bases their entire identity on their “Top 10 Best Games of All Time” list.
*Raven, piloting EDWARD-4, firing two gatling guns at an enemy outside of the frame
Armored Core VI is the type of game you can play while listening to heavy guitar music. No need to worry about The Cribs ruining the mood because they are the mood. This is an action game with serious moonlight action; combat in Armored Core VI Glitters Like Gold as gravity dances around me and I am rhythmically flowing to the violence beat. Combat is the Raven: fly away, approach from behind, leave and come back, or simply ignore; it’s your choice; gather those wings and fly. Picture being the most athletically fit human being in existence who is actually a robot that can also fly and is a master of all-weapons-ever; on the ground, you are a figure-skater with strawberry-switchblades and military-grade artillery, and in the air, you are dash-blasting at supersonic-speeds while simultaneously launching rocket salvos and sharpshooting enemies below with pinpoint accuracy (thanks to the game’s generous but only-sometimes-slightly-annoying lock-on system), and if that doesn’t sound appealing, simply change your robot’s build and do something else. You are Raven; as slow or as fast as you want, as bulky or as fragile as you want, as strong or as weak as you want, as stupid or as smart as you want; change the mechanical parameters of the computer game simply by changing your robot’s build, and while the variety is excellent and presented in the most stupid-cool way possible, there are drawbacks.
For how “fun” Armored Core VI plays (and it is incredibly “fun”; one of the most fun games I have ever played mechanically in terms of exhilaration, sitting on the edge of your seat, jumping a bit when you fire a high-impact weapon because it’s just “that cool” and heavy), it’s easy to say there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to play if the goal is efficiency. The mainstream gaming press pressured FromSoft to add a difficulty slider to their earlier games, an “easy mode,” and FromSoft caved and actually did it with Armored Core VI; except, the difficulty slider isn’t a slider: it’s baked into the weapons and the builds, and it’s not esoteric, it’s not something you have to look up online. Do you like shotguns, immediately equipping them on your robot the moment they become available? Congratulations, you have discovered the most powerful build in the game: two SG-027 ZIMMERMAN shotguns. Do you like Gundam Wing and want to make a Heavyarms Custom build with two gatling guns? Congratulations, you have just discovered the second-best build in the game. Defenders of this easy-to-break-ness will tell you that “you have to look up the best builds” or “why did you look up how to break the game,” and this is simply not the case if you have good taste (which I do and my horn is loud). I’m sure, as this essay ages, these specific examples will become outdated and wrong as FromSoft is continuously patching the game for that ever-elusive-dream called “balance,” but some variation of this will remain true, and to be clear: all computer games have some version of this problem, just not as many computer games have this problem so clearly pronounced and easy to find.
Even with this incredibly easy-to-break gameplay, the game manages to be difficult when it wants to be; certain bosses are especially brutal. The first boss, a big helicopter, is such an immediate jump in difficulty that you can find over 800 articles and fan reviews complaining about it, but this boss’s purpose is to teach the player how to pilot their robot and other key techniques, including boosting and dodging enemy attacks; which is, apparently, lost on the writers of said articles and fan reviews. Boss difficulty is partially due to the stagger bar, a feature taken from FromSoft’s earlier game Sekiro, the stagger bar is a gauge that builds up as an enemy takes damage and once topped-off staggers the enemy, stunning them for a moment and allowing for massive burst damage. For random-mook-enemies, this stagger meter is inconsequential, two shotgun blasts kill everything, trivializing almost every non-boss fight, but bosses take considerably longer to stagger and take very little damage until they are staggered. On the one hand, this prevents powering through bosses and facilitates learning boss attack patterns and adapting, but that requires actual effort, and actual effort is hard. Thankfully, Armored Core VI is never too hard, unless you’re using energy weapons and the stun baton, but even with the worst build possible: you can beat anything the game throws at you with enough effort, and that’s part of what makes Big Robot Game 6 so engaging; if you don’t want to be optimal, you don’t have to be. It took this writer 12 tries before beating the final-final-final boss, and yes, there are three final bosses, and I had fun every second of the journey.
*Raven, piloting the BURU–SHIKI V.1, boosts toward a PCA battleship at supersonic speeds; two shotguns at the ready
This is the crux of the matter: the gameplay. I could write about the setting, the plot, and the themes, but I’ve already written over ten thousand words inspired by those three topics in the other chapters of 621: Quoth the Raven.
In conclusion, I give Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon a solid [redacted].
(Originally published on 10/7/2023)