I really tried to see what other people are seeing in this game but while I enjoyed the game overall the difficulty balancing and the combat left me with mixed feelings.

The experience of playing AC6 is valleys of boredom induced by tepid mission design that poses zero threat to the player interspersed with massive difficulty spikes from set piece bosses a la Souls games. It's incredibly uneven and frankly baffling that this made it into a commercial game in 2023. This problem is extremely pervasive and negatively affects what I assume is the core appeal of AC: the customization. The ideal should be that you can create your personal mech and change weapons when problems arise for it with a variety of solutions that are viable and fun. But once a wall hits you and you start experimenting with the weapons, you realize only a small selection of weaponry is good enough to defeat the difficulty spikes without taking obscene amounts of time(i ran out of ammo on bosses even when i wasn't using the "correct" build). I am sure there is other ways to do it, this is my first AC after all and it's very likely I'm missing some build or specific weapon usage, but I couldn't find anything better than an extremely stagger heavy build with high damage weapons(like shotguns). You can beat the whole game with this setup and everything else i tried felt terrible to use in comparison. This made the customization of the game feel pointless to me. What's the point of customizing further when most content is steamrolled regardless of your mech and bosses require such high DPS and stagger? That's what i mean by the difficulty balancing issue being pervasive. It compromises what I assume is the appeal of AC.

I think one of the contributing factors to the limited feeling customization in AC6 is how stagger was implemented. If you are doing DPS and the enemy isn't staggered, you are basically just doing chip damage. Which is fine against AC's, but when you are against the set piece bosses it feels terrible. They simply have far too much HP to not feel like endurance tests rather than engaging fights. So staggering is the best strategy against most boss encounters. I also think stagger on the player just feels bad. You get punished extremely hard by being forced to stand still for a second which is death on lighter mechs. Stagger as a mechanic should have stayed in Sekiro.

Despite all of this, The AC duels are really fun. You can actually customize meaningfully in a personalized manner and still have fun! The fights are fast, brutal, and frantic and it's how i imagined AC was going to be. If the entire game was just AC fights I wouldn't have any complaints besides the stagger, which unfortunately still plays a role in these fights. Regardless, the arena and the story AC fights are the best parts of the game bar none. The fantasy of being a skilled mecha pilot was truly realized here.

Back onto the mission design, i think that it would have been vastly improved if they had attrition elements and resource management baked into the game's systems. Apparently previous AC games had you make financial decisions and struggle with debt which I find more interesting than what we got. There's no struggle with ammo management, you can sell parts for 100% refund, and you get obscene amounts of money from most missions. All this make me feel like money is a waste of time in this game. All it does is save you from menuing more often when you accumulate a lot of it. As for the ammo management, it makes every mission just spray and prey with no thought involved, especially since you take very little damage. Since the mission design is so trivial, they should have put these elements back in so there is some element of conflict going on here. As is it's extremely boring and easy. The lack of meaningful exploration and encounter design also really doesn't help.


I do quite like the feel of the mecha in this game, and the story isn't half bad once the real plot starts going on in the last third of the game. I also think the aesthetics are on point, the blazing sky illuminating hellish abominations of machinery and metal are quite striking and the mecha designs are pretty sick. I complained a lot in this review but I still enjoyed enough to say that I think the game is alright. But It's certainly the weakest fromsoft game I've played. It feels like a janky PS2 game in all the good ways and bad ways with a sloppy implementations of modernization on top of it that hurt the experience more than it helps.

i'd wager there are many who try to undertake a more fair critical analysis when writing about this game. for the sake of transparency, let's just say i can't. this isn't about a stringent inability to separate art from the artist, this is about my inability to separate art from its era.
- it is emblematic of a dark period in capcoms oeuvre, in which they repeatedly made awful creative and financial decisions in an attempt to both maximize revenue and appeal to western markets
- it is easily one of the most repugnant, misogynistic games ive ever played; it possesses some of the worst writing ive ever seen in a game while still supposedly aspiring to shakespearean greatness. none of its musings on society ever come together nor can it be enjoyed as a charming romp when so little of its characterization is either endearing or palatable
- the calvacade of capital G Gamers who were thoroughly unimpressed by this title inspired a desperate and petty form of tribalism from the likes of varying industry figures that continues to resurface to this day...
- ...which, inadvertently, largely reminds of a kind of rampant xenophobia that existed in the seventh generation of games, a quiet dismissal of anything japanese in the medium and a refusal to engage with their works on sincere grounds (look no further than the original niers critical admonishment). ninja theory felt completely comfortable disparaging and blaspheming the original franchise that they now held the keys to in an era where inescapable indie 'beloveds' like jonathan blow and phil fish rallied to antagonize an entire country's output to the medium
- ninja theory had zero right to patronize or criticize, by the way, given that itsuno had to babysit them to teach them anything at all about proper enemy design, combat design, and so on and so forth. their action game couldn't even be considered average until the release of the special edition
- honestly think the games environments look like dogshit, considering it's the one thing everyone is unanimous in praise of. 2000s movie poster type bullshit

a stark reminder of an awful time to be a participant in the medium and the sole reason i refuse to be accessory to ninja theory in any financial capacity. sacrilege if im being real. hilarious that dmc5 reconciles with this games western sensibilities to often brilliant effect by comparison

As a longtime fan of the Armored Core soundtracks I am tremendously underwhelmed by AC6.
Also the performance on PC has been abysmal in my case. No idea why a 10700 and 1660ti can't run this thing properly without severe framerate chugging in combat. I managed to make it playable by disabling some unwanted post processing and reducing shadows and whatnot, but it still irks me and reeks of poor optimization in the first place.
Obfuscating S Rank requirements does the game no favors either.
But seriously what happened to the driving anthems from the last 4 games?! Stargazer isn't enough, I need m o r e.
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btw the actual game is fine tbh