It’s been interesting to watch the reaction to Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. After its expanded showing at last week’s Summer Game Fest event, one attendee summed up the overall mood around the game with a dismissive, “It’s just more Armored Core, isn’t it?”
Well, yes. Handed what amounts to a blank check after a decade of hits including Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, FromSoftware has opted to return to one of its earliest hits. This is FromSoftware being defiantly FromSoftware, ignoring the pressure to turn Armored Core into another Soulsborne game and making what it wants to make.
“The essential direction of [Armored Core VI] was to go back and take a good look at the core concept of Armored Core and what made that series special,” FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki told us in an interview last year. “So we wanted to take the assembly aspect, assembling and customizing your own mech — your AC — and then being able to exact a high level of control over the assembled mech…we wanted to take those two core concepts and reexamine those in our modern environment.”
In short, it’s definitely more Armored Core, and frankly, I couldn’t be happier.
Armored Core’s essential DNA
The demo shown at Summer Game Fest had the essential DNA of the series, down to the grim industrial megastructures and the emphasis on energy management, and many of the demo’s crucial elements will be familiar to longtime fans of the series. The AC shown has a gun in one hand, an energy sword in the other, and missiles on both shoulders. Success is predicated on managing such disparate elements as heat dissipation and energy generation to create a mech that can take on all comers. Completing a mission — Armored Core VI is mission-based rather than open world — earns you money to buy parts that can be used to upgrade your mech.
Combat is a strategic series of attacks and counterattacks. You strafe and dodge boost around shots, with an energy shield available to defend against the attacks that get through, then return the favor with a hail of missiles and gunfire. A stagger gauge builds as you strike more powerful foes until they are incapacitated, whereupon you can do large amounts of damage with your melee weapon.
Armored Core VI’s stagger mechanics is being hailed as a new feature by FromSoftware, but longtime fans have been managing their mech’s stability since time immemorial. In Armored Core V, simply getting shot by a high impact weapon was often enough to freeze you in your tracks. Armored Core VI takes what was already there and makes it more overtly video game-y, altering the rhythm of the combat in the process. At first blush, it mainly seems intended to give some flow to the boss fights, but it could have some interesting implications for player-versus-player battles.
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Another noticeable difference is that the level design seems more refined than it was in Armored Core V, which was broadly focused on multiplayer and thus featured missions built around shorter, simpler objectives. It has a particular emphasis on verticality, whether you’re staring down at enemy units below and planning your attack, or launching high into the air via a catapult. While on the surface it bears little resemblance to the Dark Souls of the world, FromSoftware emphasizes that you’ll be “exploring vast, intricate levels,” starting on the outside and delving deeper and deeper into its superstructure.
Enemy ACs lurk within these towers, and navigating these encounters will test your ability to spec out your mech. In the demo shown by the FromSoftware, a standard AC runs into a heavy quadruped AC, which quickly overwhelms and destroys it. The player is then able to jump into the spec screen and swap in more maneuverable reverse joint legs, allowing them to evade the quadruped’s shots with ease.
One item of note: While Armored Core VI doesn’t exactly look easy, it does seem more forgiving than some of FromSoftware’s past efforts. Dying to an enemy mech or boss will typically see you respawn a relatively short distance away, and periodic resupply points will replenish your ammo. No, there isn’t an equivalent to FromSoftware’s iconic bonfire system, at least from what I can see. Mechs don’t need to rest by the campfire, after all.
The Roomba from hell
The demo ends with a glimpse of one of Armored Core VI’s fierce boss fights: a monstrous Roomba known as the “Smart Cleaner” that waves heated grinder arms and spews lava. Little is shown of this fight, but FromSoftware has claimed that boss fights are a “highlight of the game,” so we’ll have to see whether they take any cues from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which was designed by Armored Core VI director Masaru Yamamura.
Even if it does, though, I seriously doubt that Armored Core VI will win over the newly-minted soulsborne fans who loved Elden Ring. This is an Armored Core for Armored Core fans – the type of people who want to sit around tinkering with their fantasy mech, trying to find the right build for all occasions. It seems as if FromSoftware is building the game that they themselves want to play, and I find that sort of admirable in an industry where everything is market tested to death.
As someone with a decent amount of history with the series myself, I’m eager to sit down and tinker with customization and see what kind of builds I can come up with. I’m also curious to see how the multiplayer battles – arguably the soul of the series – ultimately pan out. There’s a lot to love about Armored Core beyond its tangential connections to Dark Souls and Elden Ring, which is how the series has retained such a loyal fandom for so long. I’m glad FromSoftware seems to know it.
There’s lots more Summer Game Fest coverage on IGN, so check out our previews of Mortal Kombat 1 and Alan Wake 2 as well as our first look at Armored Core VI from earlier this year.
Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
