If Rusty has a million fans, I am one of them
If Rusty has five fans, I am one of them
If Rusty has 1 fan, that one is me
If Rusty has no fans, I am no longer alive
If the world is against Rusty, I am against the entire world 🗣️🔥

Game of the year right here baby


Probably not tbh, considering they would have to face Zelda TOTK, Baldur's Gate, Starfield etc. The gameplay felt amazing in AC VI and all different part combinations was exciting to see, aswell as the amazing customization. My only problem was that the game was a little too short for my liking, bosses weren't too memorable and story was kind of bland (but I don't play this game for the story nevertheless). The gameplay was fantastic and I think they should have utilized these strong mechanics to make a longer game, with more memorable and epic boss fights. I'm excited for future games of this title!

I bought the game for two reasons:
To support FromSoftware - one of the best companies out there.
And just to feel the FS art direction and design once again.
Obviously, it's not a dark souls like the game, but all recognisable FS elements are here: decay, huge spaces, a dying world, the feeling of loneliness and giant bosses.
To me, it's enough.
Let's see if I actually like mechs now.

Congratulations to from soft for making my favorite game of the year for two years in a row.

Edit: I have finally finished my first playthrough of armored core 6 and I think it's unironically perfect. I'm not sure why it has a average of 8/10 I feel like armored core is just a franchise that will always be snubbed despite being exactly what it sets out to do. The story didn't feel weak to me, I got emotional during parts and I need to stress it all is lifted by the phenomenal voice acting. You never see a human face in this game but you are able to imagine them.

Here's the just, if you want a fast paced mech game where you need to strategically pick your load outs and tinker constantly with your builds, ending up with something that completely fits your play style? This is what you want.

honestly really wanted to like this game, but after about 2 hours or so of playing, i can definitively say this is fromsofts worst game.

the game is really lacking in areas dark souls excels at. there is no interconnected world, only scattered missions that all seem to take place in similar looking snowy destroyed cities.

the enemy design is practically non-existent, they just kind of stand there waiting for you to one shot you. an ambush never feels impactful because you can just stand at super far range and deal with every enemy efficiently, unlike dark souls which has extremely intense gank fights due to you having to engage them in melee combat, where you're constantly at risk and have to learn how to properly dodge every attack.

every boss is just a big ship that spams pretty much undodgeable attacks at you and you just facetank all the damage and wait for your sword to recharge (which takes like 10 years btw). from a company that has produced such excellent bosses as ornstein+smough and slave knight gael, i really would've expected better from them.

the controls feel fine until you actually have to use your weapons, all of which having extremely long cooldowns. the sword (the only fun weapon in the game imo) takes an especially long time to charge, meaning youre constantly waiting to have fun again. youll notice good games from this studio like dark souls never had such problems, because they realized waiting 80 years for a weapon to recharge isnt fun at all.

the game constantly interupts you with walls of dialogue that is not well written in the slightest before every single mission. i thought we should've learned from dark souls that the best way to tell a story (of which dark souls has a far more interesting one) is through subtle hints in the world and in item descriptions or optional dialogue with characters.

dark souls had an incredibly praised checkpoint system which required you to complete a large chunk of a level before you got a checkpoint. armored core 6, reduces these chunks, removing all sense of tension from the game. at this point, might as well just make me immortal since death doesnt even matter at all.

the last thing i want to really touch on in this review is the healing system. for some bizarre reason, fromsoft has forgotten one of their most innovative design decisions, which was the estus flask systems from dark souls. part of what made it so great was the fact that it forced you to be stuck in place for a few seconds before you were allowed to move again, making it something you had to sacrifice your attack phase to use. unfortunately, armored core 6 foolishly does not make use of this system, allowing you to instantly heal, which at that point, you might as well just extend the healthbar because there is no point to healing.

overall, a massive disappointment from a studio i love. definitely making me doubt whether or not the upcoming elden ring dlc will be good considering the design decisions they were willing to make here.

Armored Core VI was my first AC game, with that in mind I really don't know who this game is made for and whether or not it is a good thing. Bits and pieces of the design feel completely foreign which is probably a good thing, but then it wrapped around to feeling at times way too "Elden Ring" which is very much not a good thing. And you know, maybe that's the point right? Elden Ring was the litmus test to see how a new AC game would do in the wild, but if that's the kind of action game FromSoft wishes to make I don't know if I want to be on this ride anymore.

To keep this from being all that negative, I wanna talk about how absolutely astounding good the controls are in this game. Without having played a prior AC title, ACVI not only perfectly teaches you how to play very quickly and very well, but also feels indescribably better to control and use in the hands compared to the likes of Elden Ring. Elden Ring's control scheme for lack of a better word is bloated, where ACVI is the perfect balance between complex and extremely playable. If you play with a controller, get one with paddles and customize to make the game feel even more incredible to experience.

Next, the atmosphere and music. The combo of these two has some incredible effects in this game and man oh man, did I love every second of it. ACVI has this drippy atmosphere of electricity and metal coming from the music and locals which perfectly complements the harshness of said environment. And this gets really good in some boss fights, in particular the Chapter 1 Boss, which still holds the candle for being one of the most incredible bosses FromSoft has made purely from an atmosphere standpoint. But design-wise...

Now I have to talk the in-between, Bosses. Some are really really good, and some are pretty bad. Overall, the experience is a lot more consistent and fun compared to Elden Ring's fights, but that design managed to seep in a few too many times for my liking. Hit-trading is the name of the game here, and I personally don't know if I really like it. I enjoy my Action games to be perfectible, something that both Elden Ring and this game lack hard. But, even more specifically, they only are that way because they force specific build design if you want to have a boss be even remotely possible at times. Personally, I used a pure medium build throughout the game, but many many times over it really felt like a heavy tank build was THE way to win and I hated that kind of pure hit-trade playstyle. Mechanically, some of these fights rock hard, even maybe harder than some peak Souls stuff, but that is only when hit-trading isn't the most important thing in the bosses design, which quite a few are just built for. Without going into spoilers that's all I can say.

On a different note, I found a majority of the missions incredibly fun. Moving forward with the control thing here, most missions are fairly open with lots of different terrains and enemies to deal with making them a long string of bite-sized movement and shooting challenges. They are consistently high-quality stuff, very rarely did they dip into underwhelming or even bad territory. The only ones that did are the incredibly, maybe even laughably short missions, but those don't show up so frequently as to be anything other than an afterthought.

Lastly is the story, which I think is decently good, not amazing. It doesn't really start to pick up in interest until after the first two chapters, which is enough time for people to stop caring. Luckily, I chose to care, and it offers some interesting thought choices due to the somewhat more nuanced narrative that gets brought forth. These choices are mission-based, picking one side over another. It is a very neat way of tying the game's mission structure with the narrative. It also poses some neat replayability into the game alongside the exclusive NG+ and NG++ missions/choices you unlock. In that regard, it offers far more reason to continue engaging with the game than any of the other FromSoft titles barring Sekiro.

ACVI is a great game, incredibly fun to play and an overall good experience. However, FromSoft needs to understand that building their core mechanics and bosses around having very granularly specific builds will alienate more and more players as they continue to create new titles. The peak of their boss design was in Dark Souls 3, when we were still on the edge tittering between methodical perfect play and super quick n' difficult bosses. I hope I see a return of that someday, but that isn't in this game. Or at the very least, it wasn't what I was hoping for.

Eh.

That's really the core of how I feel about this game: Eh.

Before I go ahead, I'll lay my cards on the table.

I am an AC fan, but I wouldn't call myself a passionate one. I gunned the series in 2011 in preparation for Armored Core V (second-hand hype from a friend, you see) and moved on. A few years later, I did it again and fell in love with both AC4 and For Answer. Despite this love, AC has always been a C-lister as far as franchises I care about go, so I don't have too much personal investment in it.

AC6 is alright in some areas. Mech options are great, AC vs AC fights are toptier, music is exceptional, and it's pretty. I liked the ending fights and some of the story beats, really. This is a decent AC game, sometimes.

Unfortunately, this game succumbs to death by a thousand cuts as far as annoyances go. Some are pretty significant and near-omnipresent, while others are minor but still irritating.

I will talk about this game as two separate titles: AC6 - The Armored Core sequel, and AC6 - the Souls game.

I know some of you will groan at that, perhaps due to astroturfing by AC fans insisting that this game will be 'pure', or the devs' own insistence that they didn't bother including any Souls stuff. I believed both of them until I played the game.

As an AC title, AC6 sometimes has moments where it feels like the developers just get it. You're plonked in front of a gauntlet of enemies and silently told 'time to run it, nerd'. In these moments, the developers remember that AC as a series is first and foremost a puzzle game, with your mech potentially being the solution. Early on, these sections are a bit droll since enemies can't really hurt you and you oneshot them, but the threat level amps up later on and leads to some really engaging missions. The final missions on the route I chose were the peak of this, and are some of the finest in the series.

Unfortunately, they had no faith in their own game design, it seems. I know some more hardcore AC fans hate Repair Kits, but I don't - in theory, they allow the game to hit you with longer missions than the older games without you getting worn down just by sheer attrition, and it removes the demand for perfect play.

The actual issue is that the game introduces Repair Kits on top of both checkpoints and free trips to the Assembly when you die.

Despite the game and its tutorials insisting you should be adaptable and flexible in your construction, there's simply no need to do this. You can just beat your head against an immediate threat, hit a checkpoint, and switch to a completely different AC to tackle the next one. Or, get a consequence-free resupply before a boss. It completely torpedoes the need to make versatile builds, and oftentimes it's better to simply veer into the extremes of the speedy-tanky spectrum.

Also, a minor aside that I have no idea where to insert: Turning speed is still a stat but it has no bearing on your actual camera turn speed, leading to cases where you're locked onto an enemy but can't fire because your AC is still turning. It's... Strange? I feel like it was a decision made to make some fights clearer, but the end result is more annoying than anything.

Anyway, that's the AC portion of AC6 done with. Let's talk about the Dark Souls portion.

It is painfully, agonizingly obvious that parts of this game were - intentionally or not - designed to mimic the Souls formula.

There are two types of bosses in this game. The first are enemy Armored Cores. These are great. They're where the game excels with no-catches. They're fast, frantic and intense, doing enough damage to make you sweat but not enough to do 15k of HP damage in one attack. Each AC fight is a wonderful back and forth, and even the harder ones never really bothered me. Once I got gud, they were just pure instinct; dodging, countering and trading like my controller was part of my nervous system. True to form, seeing another AC pop up in the pre-boss cutscene was a delight. If every boss was these, I would give this game an easy 5/5.

The second type are Souls bosses. I'm not saying this due to the bosses being hard - because they're not. They're frustrating more than anything. Logically, they make sense: If AC missions are puzzle-gauntlets, then it's only natural the bosses are puzzles too, right?

Well, no. The Souls bosses are too much like their namesake, boasting obscene hitboxes and overtuned damage. While the AC fights will whittle you down and occasionally hit you with something painful, Souls bosses will decimate your HP and ACS (stagger) gauge with impunity.
Up above, I said that it was better to pick one extreme of the fragile-tanky spectrum and commit to it. With Souls bosses, it sometimes feels as though going fast is the only option. Tanky builds are simply too slow to dodge the bullet hell many bosses dump on you. Fuck dude, even faster builds get clipped by a few missiles.

Yes, there are ways to dodge a lot of these attacks, but nearly every Souls boss I fought in this game had a nasty habit of vaulting to the opposite side of the arena and unleashing one. Assault Boost did nothing, and even building for Quick Boost (dodge) resulted in me losing 30% health regardless. At first, I assumed it was just me. That the bosses were fine and I simply sucked.

But fortunately you can just replay bosses rather than having to NG+. So I experimented, practiced, made new builds, got gud and... Yes, the Souls bosses are just badly designed. They're an attempt by FromSoft to capture the spectacle of their more recent titles but without adjustments for the kind of game Armored Core is. This is especially obvious with a certain lategame boss, who myself and all of my IRL friends coined "Robot Malenia" independently. They are miserable, and I am deeply happy that the final boss of each ending is an AC fight. I know some will refute this, because every 'hard game' has people insisting that there's no such thing as bad design and that detractors are just bad, but no. These bosses are terrible, even when they work. When they don't (BALTHEUS), they're even worse.

I wish the Souls influence ended at the bosses. Instead, it affects the levels too. Not all of them, mercifully, but a fair chunk of them.

An average AC level is, as described above, a puzzle gauntlet. You spawn into an area with clearly visible enemies and have to carve the best path through while avoiding overexpenditure of ammo or loss of health. Sometimes the formula deviates, like with an escort mission or a stealth mission, but the core (hehe) is the same.

AC6 adds Souls levels to the formula. They're 'open' levels wherein the only real threat is ambushes. Endless ambushes. Ambushes from above, below, behind, in front, ambushes. It is every meme about Scholar of the First Sin made manifest. The very first one is kind of cool, in part because it has the Souls geography but the AC encounter design. It soon goes to shit, though. Towards the end there's 3 of these levels back to back and they feel like Miyazaki taunting me for believing the people who said there'd be no Souls in my AC. They're not even hard, just annoying. I personally love it when I interact with a combat log and immediately take 2000 damage from enemies that spawned in and used their heavier attack before I could humanely react.

The sad part here is that while the Souls bosses are a decent recreation of their source material - down to the awful canyon wide hitboxes - the levels are not. Ambushes are all they have, and their open space is filled with nothing. Occasionally, very rarely, you'll find a data log or a part, but these are few in number. In the early levels, there basically aren't any, which is a good way to condition players to ignore exploration and in turn miss out on some great AC components.

You might find my fixation on the Souls elements exhausting, and truth be told I agree with you. But the simple fact of the matter is that the Souls elements are hamfistedly shoved into the game in ways that're deeply annoying, and the Armored Core elements are just okay. For FromSoft's big return to their niche mecha darling, I frankly expected more - and I tend not to expect things hands down.

I could talk about the story, but it's merely there. It's alright. It didn't evoke any strong feelings or thoughts. Truthfully it was fairly predictable; if you're familiar with common sci-fi tropes, have played Daemon x Machina or have a pattern-seeking brain, you'll probably figure it all out by Chapter 2. As early as Chapter 3, I called all four of the major plot twists - one of which is NG+ exclusive.

It's told to you through stiff cutscenes, scenes of two characters talking vaguely, radio calls and exposition. And... All of it sucks, because the voice acting sucks. It's stilted, half-hearted, utterly droll and oftentimes goes on too long. It feels like the Three Houses cast reading someone else's fanfiction, just utterly droll. You have fucking Patrick Seitz in a main role and waste him like this? Come on.

It pains me to rag on this game so hard, because I direly wanted a modern AC game. An AC game where FromSoft dumped their newfound expertise, technical prowess and fat stacks of cash into.

Instead, they just dumped Sekiro into AC and called it a day.

[Post-google docs edit; Hi, that last line was just me kvetching about the game design, but it turns out AC6 was directed by a guy that was a design lead on Sekiro, so. Hey.]

Pretty mediocre for what's essentially a hyped up return to the Armored Core after nearly a decade.

Gameplay isn't that tight when compared to AC3, the graphics barely feel like a proper upgrade when compared to AC5, the mecha designs aren't really interesting anymore, and the soundtrack is forgettable.



I should have expected this, since most of the talent who used to work on the AC series either left the company years ago or lost the touch on what made previous titles good to begin with.



But oh well. Not like we'll get AC7 anytime soon considering this is a break before Fromsoftware goes back to making Souls games, so I don't expect the series to get better anytime soon.

I'll just go back to AC4 once I fully finish this game, since it's nothing more than a disappointment akin to Kingdom Hearts 3 and Drakengard 3. As those game were a disappointment when compared to previous entries like Kingdom Hearts 2 and Drakengard 2.

"God, I love the military industrial complex."
- Albert Einstein after 6 straight hours of Armored Core

Armored Core is awesome because kiddie wink fuckwit Dark Souls fans and people who have sandblasted their taste away can publicly expose themselves for not understanding a single thing about AC. AC is not about epic Mech battles or lore or any bullshit. It's about you spending hours in the garage making the worst looking abomination of a unit ever so that you can throw it at a mission and see if you're stupid idea works and if it does you have the additional challenge of seeing if you can dunk on your friends with it in multiplayer.

All hail fromsoftware bringers of Kino

quick thoughts after 1 ending done and around 25 hours in: it's good, but there's also a lot i don't like. specifically the focus on bosses; it feels like nearly half of all the missions in this game have a boss in them and it's just tiring. actual AC fights are a lot of fun of course, but when it comes to non-AC bosses, they can be pretty hit or miss. this combined with the fact that these bosses truly have an inordinate amount of health means bosses feel less like a test of skill but moreso one of endurance, which would be fine but they just take so long. i'm also of the opinion that it's a bit too hard, just generally overtuned, but we'll see if i change my mind on that, i still have ng+ and ng++ to do, as well as pvp stuff, hunting down hidden parts and logs, stuff like that. the story was a pleasant surprise, though a bit confusing in its messaging, for my ending at least. lastly, it just feels so good to play. sound design is out of this world, the game looks and runs insanely well, it's just a very fun game that the developers push to its stressing point. maybe i will come around to the boss design but as of now i'm just not really feeling it, it feels more like i'm fighting a souls boss than anything and that's the last thing i wanted to feel and my #1 fear coming into this game. oh yeah the VA for walter is fucking awesome too, ayre is so bland in comparison, give me a better garage theme, reverse joints are actually good now, music is pretty forgettable unfortunately. this is stream of consciousness writing if you werent aware. fuck balteus