Review: Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Mechs and birds, fire and ash.
“They don’t make [ITEM] like this anymore.”
Saying this conjures the image of a largely if not entirely grey-haired man, sat on a porch rocking chair, complaining at nobody in particular. It is rarely correct, and usually borne from nostalgia, rather than from an actual deficiency in how something is done in the modern day. Sure, maybe paint isn’t as durable as it was back in the day, but it also doesn’t give you brain damage.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is the latest entry in the mainstream-but-also-niche Armored Core series: a collection of third-person mech action games with an extremely simple gameplay loop. You have money, you have a mech (the eponymous Armored Core, or AC), you do missions to earn more money and improve your mech with new parts to do new missions. Rinse and repeat. “Is there more to it than that?”, asked by one aggrieved Redditor after watching some gameplay for the game. Presumably they’re referring to the raft of “dopamine-enriching content” that permeates every video game now: an open world, a huge pile of collectables and side-quests, a load of little experience bars to fill up? No. There are none of these things, just you and the mission. Well, money, if you count money.
I cannot remember what the first AC game I played was, I suspect it was Armored Core 2 on the Playstation 2 based on my neurons activating when I see a screenshot of the game, though I may have also played 1. Regardless, this format is now twenty-six years old.
The game structure that I’ve given you above is the same in VI as it was in 2: sure, there’s online multiplayer matches now, and there’s an arena mode for you to fight opponents for additional upgrades, but otherwise the pedigree of the game is as clear as a sidescrolling Mario title. I always feel that it’s redundant in the age of the internet for a review to literally describe how a game plays — if you’re interested in that, you have an internet connection and access to YouTube — so my job here is to tell you why this formula works and doesn’t work. Why is this compelling, why is Armored Core VI a great game? It’s not a perfect game, it has significant flaws, but it is a great game.
In dystopian fiction, it feels somewhat rare for the protagonist to be in the dystopia. They’re fighting against it, they’re a victim of it, but they’re rarely a part of it. If they are, it’s normally the starting point of their arc, where they realise that they’re part of some horrid system, that they Are The Baddies, and they transition into a more revolutionary figure.
In the world of Armored Core, you are not leading the revolution, you are not an instigator of change, nor growing into the role of a revolutionary. You are a cog in a vast, miserable corporate machine. This machine does not engage in war — nothing so grandiose and meaningful — it merely engages in violence. Corporations spitting in each other’s eye for the most transient of advantages, the most ephemeral of gains. A large portion of time is spent fighting over a “wall”, which constantly changes hands with seemingly no benefit.
While the game provides trappings of that fighter ace feeling, enemies and friendlies engaging in the Ace Combat style “oh my god it’s X!”, the game is consistent in considering the player character to be little more than sentient, gun-wielding meat. “Tourist”, “Hound”, “Corporate Dog”; dialogue is replete with dehumanising terms, and attributes of your “generation” (as an augmented human) are rattled off like features of an iPhone. “This generation was known for its low battery life.” “This generation was known to be prone to emotional turmoil”.
But why would you deserve better?
You wordlessly crash onto battlefields with no flag, no affiliation; swiftly murdering everyone that you’ve been paid to murder, destroying everything you’ve been paid to destroy. Even the foes you face have character, bristling with spite or even sometimes a sense of understanding. You? The only defining feature of the player character is their dogged determination to do exactly what they have been paid to do: no objection, no prevarication. Money in hand and missiles in flight. There is no greater justification for your actions, no value set that you’re embodying or betraying, other than the drive to make cold, hard COAM.
The ability to tell this kind of story is only possible as a result of Armored Core VI’s cyclic gameplay loop. The player’s motivation is unlocking and purchasing new parts, building a better or cooler mech, then sortieing out again. You are not given time to introspect, you’re simply pulled by your own desires into the next mission. There is a story going on, but you’re merely the force that drives that story along through violence, dancing to the tune of your handlers and controllers.
At least, a good chunk of the game plays out in that manner, but it sadly gets worse as time goes on.
I want to avoid spoilers as much as possible, so I’ll leave it at: I think the story starts off very well, but is disappointing towards the end as it trends towards more typical action game territory. There are some decisions that the player character gets to make which, to me, don’t make any sense (it doesn’t make sense why the player character is allowed to make these decisions, given how they’re treated up until that point). I would also add that there’s a moment near the very end of the game which I found extremely bizarre, momentum-busting, and very confused.
Thankfully, in the heat of the gameplay, those niggling story issues fall out of your consciousness.
It’s about that mission where every movement, every launch, every gunshot goes where it needs to go, dispatching waves of chatty, hapless mooks with cold, ruthless efficiency. Against rival ACs and the selection of Armored Core VI’s excellent bosses, it’s about that moment of death drive: every weapon firing or overheated, thrusters burning, your generator energy critically low, your head full of impassive virtual voices as ammo counts and armour points plummet. “AP at 50%, right shoulder ammunition at 30%, AP at 30%.” Klaxons and alarms blaring as you get just enough energy to dodge the next gigantic swarm of missiles, or the next enormous laser beam: like a ballerina in an active firefight. Unless you take the tank tread legs, or the quadruped legs, in which case you are the firefight, unleashing tidal waves of missiles and lead to the tune of AC6’s phenomenal soundscape.
It’s that feeling of being incredibly dangerous, and so much of the game is about giving the player the ability to express that viciousness. In looks, with emblem customisation and paint designs, but more importantly in combat. Gameplay differs enormously between ranges and leg-types, and I felt myself boomeranging between different setups because they offered such a vibrant difference in experience. But whether you’re a treaded, artilleried, rolling building of destruction, or a lithe, blade-wielding, skeletal figure, you always feel and look dangerous.
Crushing, inexorable, metallic death. Everything in this game looks and sounds so damned good. I don’t want to link any songs, because they’re meant to be heard in the moment, with gunfire as percussion. Elden Ring’s soundtrack was a belting, orchestral masterpiece, and Armored Core VI’s is just as well put-together, though the tracks have to respect that there’s simply a lot more noise in AC6 than there is in any Souls game. Despite all the crashing, banging, missile and laser fire, I still came crawling back to Youtube to hear some of those songs again. I simply cannot find fault with the aesthetics of it. Perhaps some of the visual/sound effects can get in the way of important information, but if we can’t have egregious particles in a mech game, what hellish existence are we suffering?
Good grief. When this game comes together, there’s just nothing quite like it.
Sadly there is a thorn in the formula, a chafe that makes the fashionable shoes a little too tight at times.
There is a mechanic shared with another FromSoft game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, where “posture” was an important resource that the player was forced to manage. In Sekiro, it acted as something of a “defence meter”, where you could block incoming attacks by simply holding a button, but at the cost of your meter being filled. If it filled up completely, then your character was put into a stagger state and likely killed by the next attack. This mechanic was shared with enemies, where perfect parrying (pressing the block button with exact timing) would inflict posture damage to the attacker, and cause no posture damage to yourself; maxing out your enemies’ posture bar would allow you to inflict your own deathblow upon them.
Sekiro was this delightful, lethal dance, where even the defensive options of perfect parrying, mikiri countering, and jumping had an offensive benefit through inflicting posture damage. Unlike in the Souls games, where the player’s best option is just to stand and watch what the boss is doing, Sekiro encouraged endless frenetic aggression from both the bosses and the player. It managed to fully capture the energy of a “last ditch” sword fight, where the price of failure is instant death.
In Armored Core VI’s case, the mechanic simply does not work.
There are some differences: rather than causing instant death or deathblows, being put in the stagger state means that you take considerably more damage, lose your momentum, and are stunned for 1-2 seconds. When it comes to fighting enemies, staggering them is easily the most effective strategy, to the point that it becomes regressive. Weapons that don’t inflict large amounts of stagger damage often gather dust on the shelf, and going in with a build that isn’t focused on causing the stagger state in enemies often feels like you’re deliberately nerfing yourself. With the stunning amount of weapon and build variety in Armored Core VI, there were always going to be winners and losers, but it’s a shame that the winners category is so easily defined. This is not to say that you can’t have fun by rocking up with your mid-range, low stagger damage assault rifle build, but the game is going to be far harder than if you just packed a SG-027 ZIMMERMAN.
However, where the wheels really start to fall off the bus is when we come to stagger on the player.
In Sekiro, stagger was effectively another “mistake” meter. If you were getting staggered, it simply meant that you weren’t parrying with proper timing. When the bar filled — which in my experience was rare — the expectation was that you were going to die. This was fine, because it felt like something you could actively prevent, and if you saw things were going the wrong way then playing well (parrying, countering, dodging) would allow you to retreat that bar and get it going in the right direction. If you couldn’t, then c’est la vie, the fight was over, you lost.
In Armored Core VI, stagger feels like you’re blissfully cruising down the motorway, but every minute or so, your passenger yanks on the handbrake.
At the speeds of movement and combat in the game, it is simply not acceptable to be removing control from the player with the regularity that AC6 does towards the end of the game. I’ve got an entire treatise in me on this, because I think if we start reframing stuns and staggers in games as “unplugging the player’s controller” (which is functionally what they do), then we might be less inclined to be as egregious with them as modern gaming tends to be. I play a video game to play a video game, not to sit and watch a video on my monitor. Let me play the game, please stop yanking the controller out of my hand. From Software are consistently the worst studio in the AA/AAA space for disrespecting the player in this regard, with the Souls series having some of the worst examples of player-time-wasting in the mainstream industry.
The impact bar in AC6 recovers after a period of not taking impact damage, but with the amount of projectiles and frequency of small chip damage, it means that the bar can be filling without you really noticing. One moment you’re cruising along, having the time of your life, the next moment it’s BEEP BEEP BEEP and you’re suddenly standing still, eating immense piles of shit. It’s awful, utterly awful, and while I appreciate symmetry in mechanics between the player and opponents, there has to be a good reason for it. I could go on, I could talk about how it’s a “lose more” mechanic — which From Software are also obsessed with despite it being awful game design — and I could also talk about how being staggered knocks off weapon charging, making charged weapons even worse, but I’ll end it there. It’s a blemish on the game, not a fatal one, but a significant chafe.
While we’re in negativity valley, I’ll leave you with a couple more criticisms in quickfire format:
The amount of verticality in the game means that the camera has to be more willing to swing out from your character, otherwise your vision is being blocked by your own character model. With the speed and proximity of enemies meaning that their relative angular velocity is massive, the camera needs to have strong interpolation and distancing from the player character, otherwise it turns into a yanky, unintelligible mess. That is, if you’re a developer that cares even remotely about the camera, which From Software is not, and has never been. Hooray! Yet another From Software game that has chronic camera issues. Can’t wait for the next Souls-like where they stalwartly refuse to have the camera be able to clip through surfaces, leading to exactly the same abysmal camera problems that their titles have had for decades oh my god.
Yet another From Software game where a critical button is by default mapped to clicking in a control stick on controller (assault boost). It is not, and has never been, a good idea to do this, as it is highly imprecise and often the victim of poor controller manufacturing.
Now, you’re likely left in the lurch.
I gave you a vibrant, positive description of the game’s core loop, only to then beat you over the head with a fairly vicious diatribe, but I’m going to stand by what I said at the start. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is a great game. If you’ve played any of the prior entries, have even a passing appreciation for the wonder of bipedal fighting machines, enjoy Gundam, or want a fast-paced third-person action game that is unlike anything else being made in the AA/AAA sphere, then I heartily recommend it. It’s an uncut gem; it could be better, it needs the rough edges to be smoothed off, but it’s absolutely worthy of appreciation. I expect that patches (which have already been occurring) will kick some of these issues down a hole.
In terms of PC performance, it ran stunningly well for a From Software PC release, and I’ve been getting far better frames in it than I did with Elden Ring, though there were some significant drops when particularly massive particle effects were going off. Otherwise, it was smooth as butter on my 2070 SUPER.
Here’s the thing. Despite my occasional frustrations at the mechanics, or the camera, or the story, you really don’t get games like this anymore. At least, not from other developers. There’s a part of me that wants to recommend it purely off the back of it being a fairly-priced, non-microtransaction stuffed, singleplayer game. The whole experience has been somewhat nostalgic for me: not just the gameplay, which is still rooted in that classic Playstation third-person era, but the meta-elements. Launching and playing a complete game? Remember that?
Well, thankfully, I don’t have to resort to vaguely moralising arguments. You should play Armored Core VI because it’s a fantastic ride, with some lows, but stratospheric highs.
It is well worth your time, and I’ll be going in for New Game +.