Stays true to it's predecessors and brought me back to being a kid trying to build the perfect mech in the original armored core games. An old school game for capital G Gamers where fun gameplay is the main attraction rather than a compelling story, deep world, interesting characters, or moral conundrum being the focal point. This is not to say that the story, world, or characters aren't compelling, but the gameplay is clearly the star of the show here. Combat is fast and frantic yet a touch of that Dark Souls DNA still shines forth during the boss fights that are challenging and require attention and disciplined dodge timing. I will say however, that this is the first Fromsoft game in a long while that didn't totally blow me away and suck me into it's world immediately.

Don't get me wrong the game is super fun and I really enjoyed it, but I think two main things somewhat soured an otherwise amazing experience. The first issue is the way the game is structured with individual levels giving me a really clear stopping point every 10-20 minutes when playing so I didn't find myself as deeply immersed as I did with Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Bloodborne, or Sekiro for example. The second issue is that pretty early on I tried dual wielding the Zimmerman shotguns for a boss fight I was struggling with and never felt the need to experiment with anything else because they felt worlds better than anything else I had tried previously. This left me somewhat shoehorned into a certain build only ever really customizing my shoulder weapons based on what mission I was on. "Why not just use different hand weapons to change it up a bit?" I hear you say: Because why would I purposely make my build less effective just to shake things up? This is why balance is so important in games with lots of build options, you have to save the gamer from their own tendency to optimize the fun out of the game. Later on I found out that double Zimmerman's had basically become a meme so I imagine many people can relate to this one.