Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon Review: FromSoftware’s Most Demanding Game Yet?
time to fly developer FromSoftware has become something of a household name in the past couple of years that’s of course thanks to games like dark souls and bloodborne that have established it as one of the best video game creators working today and with the enormous success of a game like last year’s Elden ring it’s only natural that the company would have some newly devoted fans willing to charge into whatever battle it’s going into next and because of that there are a lot of people who are excited about Armored Core 6 Fires Rubicon who maybe haven’t
never played an Armored Core game before and while I don’t think those people will be necessarily disappointed about what this game has in store for them I think it’s really important to set some expectations off the bat this is not robot Dark Souls the series has never been that and it certainly still isn’t in this new installment hi I’m Giovanni Colantonio I’m the gaming section lead here at digitaltrends.com and I’m here with my review of Armored Core 6 Fires of Rubicon now if you had never really heard of the Armored Core Series before last year’s
game awards when Armored Core 6 was revealed don’t feel too bad hardcore Armored Core fans would have you thinking that this has always been a really
mech genre but it’s gotten mixed reviews outside of that and for good reason now with Armored Core 6 it looks like FromSoftware is looking to give the series some Modern appeal and in a lot of ways I do think it accomplishes that however having played it you can still see why this Series has had trouble breaking into the mainstream it’s undeniably a strong action game but it’s also an acquired taste that I think won’t necessarily be for everybody okay that’s a silly thing to say obviously no game is for everybody and especially FromSoftware games certainly
aren’t for everybody but let’s talk about the basics of what Armored Core 6 is to see if it’s a game for you in Armored Core 6 you control a Mech pilot who finds themselves in the middle of an Interstellar conflict there’s this mysterious substance called Coral which is capable of fueling a super weapon of course that needs to be stopped so it’s up to you to get into Mech and blow up a whole bunch of robots now obviously the story is a little more complex than that it’s a pretty lore heavy dry sci-fi story that
didn’t necessarily click for me but it does get into some interesting territory in its Fifth Act it’s almost a little old school and it’s storytelling and honestly the game itself is a little old school and that’s something that you really need to know before going into this you can tell that this game is a continuation of a series that left off 10 years ago on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. it’s not an enormous open world game or anything like that the idea is that you’re jumping into bite-sized missions on somewhat small Maps where you
have to blow a bunch of robots collect some data or fight a boss honestly it’s a little bit repetitive at times and on top of that it’s not necessarily the most modern or best looking game a lot of the levels feel a little bit flat with not too much detail to them so if you’re coming into this expecting something as Grand as Elden ringer honestly even bloodborne that’s a place where you should take a step back and know what you’re getting into now the good news is that the game itself actually plays really really well
the first couple of minutes that you’re going to spend with this are going to feel kind of like a revelation right out the gate the act of controlling a Mech is kind of incredible despite the fact that they look really huge and clunky your Mech actually moves at an incredibly Fast Pace you can boost around at high speeds like you’re in f-zero and you can fly in any direction giving the game a lot of verticality both in Exploration and combat that aspect of the game is pretty fantastic as FromSoftware has worked pretty hard to make
a Mech game that feels pretty fluid and that’s also in the basics of how combat Works rather than having to stop and aim at a bunch of small enemies this game uses a pretty interesting lock-on system all you have to do is sort of get enemies close to a reticle in the middle of the screen and when you fire weapons they’ll sort of track them now that system can feel a little bit loose at times there are definitely some boss fights where I felt like my shots just weren’t hitting enemies but for the most part
it’s a pretty cool system it allows you to run and Gun a little bit more blowing up a lot of small enemies as you shoot forward you never really have to take your foot off the gas pedal and honestly you shouldn’t because this is an incredibly fast-paced game and a really demanding one at that and that’s something that I think is going to be a little bit tough for people to handle if they haven’t played an Armored Core game before the controls of this game are frankly physically painful if you’re using a controller there is
a lot that you have to manage at once to fly the robot you need to hit a to hover in the air and then move around with the left joystick then you have four weapons which are controlled with your triggers and bumpers at the top of the controller and on top of that you need to control your camera because the lock-on mechanism for this game game is kind of flimsy and doesn’t really work all too well and we’ll talk about that a little bit later it can feel really awkward to hold the controller and I
would be lying if I said there weren’t Parts where my hands felt like they were cramping up and since FromSoftware of course doesn’t like to give you a lot of accessibility options or difficulty options that means that there’s going to be something of a barrier of entry it can be really hard to actually play this game so just be warned of that going into it especially if you’re someone whose hands just hurt really easy now the actual combat system is pretty exciting too the idea is that you can hold up to four weapons at a
time that includes a weapon in each hand and rocket launchers on each shoulder the battles in this game kind of feel like a Mech ballet of sorts as you’re dodging enemy attacks you’re also firing off your four different weapons managing your cooldowns and making sure you can always get a shot in the idea of it is actually really different from dark souls in Dark Souls it’s more about standing your ground and looking for an opportunity to attack but that’s not exactly the case here it’s all about pushing the advantage you want to burn down enemy
stagger bars as fast as you can so you can burn down their health quickly and frankly I like that system a lot it makes for a really thrilling action game that’s not about sitting and waiting around but rather going all in on your opponents and it’s not necessarily about dodging damage either so much as it is mitigating as much of it as possible you’re gonna get hit a lot in this game and that’s okay but what makes this system really work is the heart and soul of this game which is the mech customization system at
any point you can hop into your main menu and throw different parts on your Mech that you can buy in a shop and unlock throughout the game these include different weapons but it also includes Parts like legs and arms which change the stats of the robot some parts might give you a lot more Health but also make your Mac way heavier the idea is that you always need to be tinkering to create the best robot for any mission and when you die in a mission failure isn’t necessarily failure instead it’s an opportunity to go back
to the drawing board find a part that maybe isn’t working quite right and swap it out with something else in the first major major boss in this game I was banging my head against the wall for hours my tool set just wasn’t really working and I could only get about a third of its Health down at best at some point I had to swallow my pride go into the main menu and start experimenting around with new weapons and armor types as soon as I did that I started stumbling into a build that felt a lot
more viable until I was able to take down that boss with ease this game isn’t about getting good it’s about engineering a victory and I think that makes it kind of special but of course I can’t pass up a good metaphor and that’s where some of my criticism of Armored Core 6 starts to come into play I think this game is kind of a perfect metaphor for FromSoftware in both good and bad ways if you’ve seen my Eldon Ring review on this channel you know that there are things about the company that I find a
little bit frustrating while I love Elden ring as much as anybody else there are some dated elements to that game like it’s poor camera that I just wish FromSoftware would fix and unfortunately all of those complaints carry over into this game and are a little more complicated here so for instance yes the third person camera in this game is not very good and that is an understatement now in a game like Dark Souls that’s kind of okay yeah it’s annoying when a camera gets stuck in a giant enemy but these enemies tend to be pretty
slow and you can keep them centered in frame for the most part that’s not the case here because the battles are way more hectic and fast paced you’re dealing with enemies that can move in any direction and Zip by you at Super speeds and not only that the lock-on system which I mentioned earlier doesn’t work super well so you can’t necessarily track them very easily so because of that you’re at the mercy of a camera that frankly has a mind of its own it’s incredibly hard to keep track of targets especially smaller ones that fly
around Arenas at high speeds there is a boss pretty late in the game that frankly made me want to quit the entire thing I just couldn’t keep track of it as it flew around I physically could not move the camera fast enough to keep up with it now that’s bad enough and it makes some of the already really hard boss fights really challenging in this but it’s not the only thing that drives me nuts I personally think that FromSoftware has shall we say not the most legible UI in its games and Armored Core 6 might
be its worst yet and here’s an example of that your weapons are represented by some really small text in the bottom right corner of the screen whenever they run out of ammo a little bit of red text comes up that lets you know that they’re recharging now it’s really hard to see that and it’s especially hard during extremely heated battles where you cannot take your eyes off the action for even a second you always need to be dodging attacks constantly which makes it very difficult to know when your attacks are actually done with their cooldowns
or not there were some late game boss fights where I frankly just gave up on trying to look in the corner and just was hammering buttons as fast as I could in hopes that they would recharge eventually and fire off a shot on top of that there are systems in the game that really aren’t explained well at all there was this early boss fight I had which was against this giant helicopter type thing and I was really struggling to make a dent in it I would only really understand anything about fight thanks to a reviewer’s
guide that got sent out with the game which explained damage types now that guide went into great detail about all the different damage types in the game and the armor that resists it and that really helped me make a viable build but none of that is actually in the game and that makes it really difficult to know what you’re really doing when you’re tinkering around with parts I imagine that a lot of people are going to get help from YouTube videos and guides and that’s fine but the joy of this game comes from experimenting and
tinkering around it just feels like you’re not given all the tools that you need to do that successfully and that makes parts of the game feel obtuse that I don’t think really suits its strong points so here comes my metaphor Armored Core 6’s Loop is all about building the best robot that you can you’re constantly taking out parts that don’t necessarily work and putting in better ones each change that you make makes a stronger more viable robot that can get you through really tough battles and in some ways you could say that that’s sort of
a metaphor for iterating on a long-running series like Armored Core you always want to make the next game better than the last and to do that you need to take out the things that don’t work and put in new things that work a little bit better and FromSoftware does do that in a lot of ways that I think make for a really exciting action game however there are still a few parts in this that feel rusted I think things like a poor camera or illegible UI or really demanding controls are going to make it really
hard for this game to find mainstream success in the same way that Dark Souls has it still very much feels like a game that’s built for those Mecca enthusiasts who have always loved the series and I do think it’s going to bring in some new fans too it’s a really exciting action game and the act of moving around and shooting just feels really phenomenal at times however it also still feels like there’s some work to be done to get the series really tuned up I mean we haven’t had an Armored Core game in 10 years
so I guess it only makes sense that there would be a little bit more work to do and here’s my hope if this game is successful I imagine it’ll get FromSoftware more room to Tinker around find what works and find what doesn’t work but to do that I do think it’s going to need to shed a little bit of its stubbornness S2 it feels like FromSoftware still has a couple of dated Parts in all of its games that really could and maybe should be swapped out Armored Core 6 almost feels a bit like flying an
incredibly powerful strong Mech but with faulty thrusters on its back it’s certainly not enough to take away from some of the spectacular Thrills in this game but I do hope that it can spend a little bit more time in the garage so that we can see the best possible version of it on its next outing
