This game legimitely surprised me! After hearing for years that Armored Core was a series defined by its incredibly hard controls and punishing slow gameplay I wasn't ready for this game to be almost weirdly accessible.
The single biggest difficulty hurdle with this game is getting used to its weird non-stick control scheme, from there you get the freedom to customize your mech however you want and buy and resell parts 1:1 which means there's no penalty from just selling and redoing your entire build from scratch. Certain strategies and parts benefit certain missions, and the game obviously wants you to experiment with it. Even if the customization isn't as in-depth as later games it's still fun figuring out the best way to handle problems and making a cool looking robot.
Fuck that final mission though.