Publication Date: 15/03/2025

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

As someone who has been utterly biased towards them ever since I first played the immaculate Dark Souls, FromSoftware haven’t really had a miss for me since Demon’s Souls - but that stellar record is helped by there almost being nothing *but* Souls-style games since then. Despite being tailored for me, a known mecha anime lunatic, I’ve never touched an Armored Core game, both from a lack of availability, and a general sense of intimidation towards the infamously in-depth mecha construction. But with the shock reveal of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon a few years back (and getting it for my birthday last year), I felt it was finally time to play the most Mitch-coded game series ever made. I just wish this style of game, in reality, worked for me as well as it did conceptually. It’s certainly not solely on the game for my mixed feelings; I just think my expectations were too far divorced from what Armored Core VI actually is. It is a good game - and where it shines, man, does it shine.

Regardless of the rest of my thoughts on Armored Core VI, I cannot extol enough the joys of actually playing this game. Rather than the dance-like encounters the Souls games frequently embody, much of Armored Core VI’s gameplay feels like playing as a bull - carefully, yet still brutally - charging into a china shop. With up to a quartet of weapons - with slots available on both your AC’s arms and shoulders (utilized by the triggers and shoulder buttons, respectively), you’ll be weaving and tanking shots to nigh-on effortlessly shoot, blow up, eviscerate, and disintegrate no small number of helpless enemy mechs. A vast amount of weapon classes to play around with helps ease you into your playstyle - personally, I enjoyed using two small arms on my AC’s, uh, arms to pepper and prod at foes, whilst having a rocket launcher and railgun-like cannon on my shoulders to annihilate anything I’d manager to stagger - and sometimes, unharmed enemies outright. There’s just so much feedback in the audio and the visuals, the heavy ‘KA-CHUNK’ of my railgun and the way my AC recoils, ever so slightly, it all comes together in a really incredible way.

No matter how you build your mech - with the choice of bipedal, reverse-joined, tank-treads or quadrupeds - there’s an ever apparent sense of weight and feel to the movement that honestly felt a little janky to ease into, but wondrous to get to grips with. FromSoft might be best known for the Souls games, and whilst elements of their flagship series have bled in a little, piloting an AC feels nothing like roaming the world of a Soulslike. Even the lightest AC has weight, a sense of push and pull, and it’s worth trying out each of the four types of movement options to find what works for you. My dodge-based Souls sensibilities haven’t quite left me, so the spring-heeled reverse-jointed legs were perfect, but the bulky, slower, yet potentially devastating tank treads also holds a certain amount of appeal. Armored Core 6, has a real nice sense of parallel progression in that way; whilst there are certainly particular AC parts that’ll help ease you into your chosen style of play, parts can only take you so far, and Armored Core VI demands a certain amount of competency from you as a pilot and a player, and a willingness to get your ass kicked whilst you learn to tame the mech. Because when you learn to pilot a mech, you can unleash the most beautiful kind of destruction that nothing can stop.

And you’ll be carrying out said beautiful destruction across Armored Core 6’s more than sixty missions, which typically are pretty straightforward in design. You’ll normally be tasked with either destroying a specific target (which sometimes can be infrastructure, but also potentially a boss target), clearing out a location’s enemies, or sometimes defending a specific structure. When it comes to missions, the game honestly swings to the simplistic side, since they do frequently just boil down to ‘slaughter a hell of a lot of mechs’, which with the core gameplay being so solid, isn’t really a bad thing in itself, but when there are moments of brilliance like genuinely satisfying stealth missions, or a set piece where you’re fighting a fleet of warships, it does make jobs like ‘Eliminate the AC Squad’ feel a little lifeless. Just a few more uniquely structured levels like these would’ve gone a long way in making me feel a bit more engaged with the game as a whole. But even if I found the more run-of-the-mill missions a little stale, I liked undertaking these missions well enough. This is mostly due to the satisfaction that comes from utterly dominating the game’s mooks never really goes away, especially once you overcome the game’s difficulty curve and begin hitting basic ACs with some of the biggest, most broken weapons in the game. Seriously, the amount of damage you can dish out at any one time with an optimized loadout? Horrifying. After finding your feet, leaping about and slaughtering foes with nary a thought given feels electrifying, and it just cements my opinion that despite the myriad of personal issues I have with Armored Core VI, the core gameplay is not remotely the issue. This game just has an incredible sense of Feel, and the feeling of taking out mook with a single railgun shot, or destroying a small squad with a powered rocket launcher? Insane.

As someone who hasn’t touched an Armored Core game in any real capacity, the biggest element that feels more akin to FromSoft’s Souls games are its boss encounters, gigantic, frequently large-scale encounters that still feel as intimate as some of Souls most iconic battles. These boss fights are, fittingly, the most challenging parts of the game, and also feature everything the game does best. Many of them are all about dancing through waves of missiles, bullets, and lasers, intercut with gigantic, wide-scale attacks that’ll fry your systems in a few seconds. Whilst I didn’t find most of them too difficult, many times they still came down to the wire, desperately throwing everything I had with all my systems going red. Incredible stuff. The boss machines you’ll be battling are also unanimously the most interesting designs in the game; gigantic behemoths like Balteus and Frost Wyrm wouldn’t work if there were more of them, but as set piece encounters? Amazing. As an aside, there’s also an Arena mode, where you can battle the various ‘normal’ AC boss fights in one-on-one, no healing environments, but I genuinely found these on the boring side, as once I’d worked out my ideal loadout (which did not, in fact, include the infamous songbirds) I was normally able to tear every AC asunder in a single attempt, frequently in less than thirty seconds. Sure, I could’ve changed my loadout to make it more challenging, but…

With how decently challenging the bosses can be, I just wish there was, well, *any* challenge to the non-boss missions. Seriously, as genuinely awe-inspiring as it can be to sweep across the plains of Rubicon, scuttling dozens of other mechs and weapon emplacements in your wake, I just wish I felt challenged by it. Unless you’re built like a complete glass cannon, you can dodge most of what the rank and file can send out at you, and shrug off any stray shots that make it through your evasive patterns. The amount of times I was killed by run-of-the-mill enemies could be counted on one hand, and whilst the power fantasy feels great, it goes a long way in making much of the game just feel… transitory. I’m not sure what the right word for it is, but after the first impression of a mission, I was pretty much on autopilot. I’ll concede that the game had its challenging moments in the first or second of its five chapters, but I’d chalk much of this up to having a weaker selection of weapons and - far more importantly - still getting to grips with how to control my AC. The excitement of these missions generally pulled me through them the first time, but I just felt no urge to hunt for S Ranks, secret weapons or lore because I just didn’t really feel much once a level was done. The game just reaches a point where it might as well be an entry in a Dynasty Warriors title half the time, and whilst there is an appeal to that, it’s definitely not what I’m looking for in Armored Core, and it’s relative ease killed a lot of my motivation to keep up with the game beyond its main story.

Beyond actually piloting your AC, the bulk of your time will be spent actually outfitting a build for your AC. Building your AC does have a bit of a learning curve, both depending on your general experience with these kinds of games, and the fact that the early sets of weapons and ‘gear’ you can buy and earn for your AC are on the fairly weak side. But even when you started getting objectively ‘good’ gear, I really found it hard to gauge from the surface what weapons were actually ‘good’. Sure, there’s the pretty seamless and robust training mode that you can play around in, but there really isn’t any real substitute for test driving weaponry in a true mission. In some cases, depending on your loadout you’ll just be hard-counted by a certain boss or special enemy, and there is some frustration in the early game where your build you were rather happy with just… doesn’t work. There’s some satisfaction in iterating on issues like this, but I much preferred fighting in the field, and spending time in the builder took away from that. There’s also a lot of equipment, usually in regards to the internal parts for your AC, that are a lot harder to gauge if they’re actually helping or hindering your chosen playstyle - for an example, targeting modules will alter how well you lock on at long, medium, or close range, but it was rare I actually felt it’s effects. But with some time, I eventually got a ‘feel’ for how it was altering my mech.

Ultimately, I think my biggest issue with Armored Core VI is after I’d discovered my preferred playstyle, and iterated on my AC’s loadout enough, there was never really a reason to switch it out. With a railgun on one shoulder, and a rocket launcher on the other, with my trusty laser rifle as a main firearm, there was pretty much nothing that could hold out against such overpowering offense - and the fact that I was able to balance this with a relatively fast, mobile frame just make my battles with this game’s greatest foes close to a cakewalk. Hell, I even took my setup online, and whilst sure, I was starting at the bottom of the ranks, I had no trouble ranking up a few times just from the sheer firepower I had on display. What I describe really isn’t at the fault of Armored Core VI; this game is designed for the freaks (non-pejorative) who are constantly testing and retesting their loadouts, iterating on the smallest percentages and whatnot. I’m not that kind of person - I’ll always look for comfort builds and weapons I can thrive with without looking up builds online or anything. The fact the game was still pretty easy even before I’d found my perfect build made this just the nail in the coffin. The fact of the matter is that this core (haha) element of this game isn’t really suited to my general gaming sensibilities isn’t an indictment of the game as a whole. I understand the people who view this as one of the best games of 2023 - for once, it genuinely is my ‘fault’ for not ‘getting it’. But whilst that’s not an indictment of the game, it’s neither an indictment of me. That’s just my personal preferences at play, and a pretty decent example of why I don’t use number grades in my reviews.

Despite it clearly not being the game’s developmental focus, I actually found Fires of Rubicon’s story quite intriguing. You play as 621, later known as ‘Raven’, an indentured servant of Handler Walter. Raven arrives on Rubicon in search of the ‘Coral’, a mysterious energy that once caused massive damage across human civilization. The power source is also being hunted by various super-corporations who’ve also arrived on Rubicon. Bouncing between multiple factions, Raven slowly uncovers the mysteries and monstrosities of Rubicon, and with a few key choices, decides the fate of the broken planet. It’s very much an example of a basic, hands-off, ‘story-lite’ game being done very well, and whilst I’ve been critical of FromSoft not putting enough emphasis on their stories in the past, I think Armored Core 6’s frequently emotional, evocative story is the perfect marriage of gameplay focus and story flavouring - helped massively by the fantastic performances of it’s voice actors. The story expands beyond its finale - almost akin to Nier: Automata, NG+ and NG++, as long as you follow certain prerequisites, will unlock new missions and stories to follow, but I honestly struggled and eventually stopped two thirds of my way into my second run through - the game was even easier, even with the otherwise exciting boss fights, and even if I was intrigued enough to want to see how the story ended, the variety in gameplay just wasn’t there to pull me through to the climax of climaxes. The new quests I encountered in NG+ were actually pretty fun and a nice change of pace, but they came so far and few between there really wasn’t enough motivation for me to continue these alternate routes.

Beyond just the stunning mech designs, I really dug the simplistic, yet evocative visuals of Fires of Rubicon. Sterile is a word I’ve heard used to describe the general art direction of the game, and I feel this extremely apt, especially in the context that Rubicon was ‘burned’ by the Fires of Ibis. Many of the locales you’ll be flying and battling across are desolate, devoid of life (sans the musou-esque amount of mechs wanting to blow you to smithereens), but it really reinforces how bad a state Rubicon is in, both following the Fires, and the desecration being carried out by the corporations. Whilst there are little collectibles or hidden parts to sniff out, I couldn’t disagree more with the complaints about the ‘empty’ world you fight in, as it does a lot of heavy lifting in the department of making Rubicon feel like a dead, or dying, world. If it was ‘alive’, well, it just wouldn’t feel the same. The audio is also nothing short of superb, especially the bombastic, high-intensity boss themes that turn these already iconic encounters into a nigh transcendental experiences. Also a huge shout out to the underrated, but hugely important sounds of the AC’s weaponry. The slow whirs of charging energy weapons, or the metallic hiss of linear rifles and rail guns, and the beautiful explosive eruptions of rocket launchers… it’s all so foundational, but it’s so often forgotten just how important solid sound design really is.

Unless I’ve done a really poor job of writing this, I’ve really struggled with putting a voice to my thoughts on Armored Core VI. It’s a game I should love, should adore, and whilst it always feels good to play and shoot in my AC, outside of some fantastic boss fights and the occasional unique mission stipulation, I never really was given enough reason on why I should care about piloting it. But as I said, I’m not a guy who loves making a ‘build’ or constantly switching my loadout, so there’s always going to be an inherent disconnect with what Armored Core is, and what I want from it. I understand the acclaim the game has received, and I want to underline that I still felt the game was fun - but after twenty hours in the world of Rubicon, I decided I was done, and I think that’s perfectly fine. For those who read this, and felt I’m talking crazy, I think you should go out and buy a copy right now - for those this game appeals to, you’ll find nothing better. For me? Well, whilst I think my journey with Armored Core VI is done for now, I certainly don’t think my time with the franchise is anywhere near its end.