Armored Core 6

Playing

I just finished getting the third and final ending on XBox. I got a little more than half of the achievements and I don't think I'll be going back to get the rest.

Likes

Fromsoft carries over the lessons learned from Elden Ring and Dark Souls to revive the Armored Core Series. They have created a game the is immensely fun to play and keep playing across multiple play throughs. The game deviates from the more recent Fromsoft games in that you interact with the world in self contained missions rather than expansive levels that you can take your time and explore. The story is a little confusing at first but it's a Fromsoft game so that's to be expected. Some the story elements are explained in the game but a lot of it needs to be inferred. Since you can't really explore the levels as fully as you can in other Fromsoft games you have to pay attention to the briefings to get the full story. The first time I beat the game I didn't fully understand the idea behind the multiple endings but the game changes a lot between play throughs. While your mech and it's loadout carry over you'll steadily get more parts and weapons added to the shop and create a massive murder machine. The ramp up and steady trickle of upgrades allows for continuous testing and experimentation. In addition to the regular missions theres also an arena with bosses from the game to test your load out. I don't really play multiplayer games and I never tried the multiplayer elements of the game so I can't really comment on them. As you progress through the story more arena battles will come in and begin to add mystery to the story line.

For a Fromsoft game the challenge is expertly crafted as usual. There were a few times where I was stuck in a spot for a while but I never felt like it was an unfair problem. One of the big challenges is figuring out the strategy for each enemy you come across. Some of them may be simple where you only need standard ballistics weapons to take them down. Others may require energy weapons to counter shields. Still others may just be too fast to hit with with normal weapons and require indirectly hitting them with missiles.

Dislikes

There's not much to dislike about this game. However as with a lot of Fromsoft games there are some things that are not explained well. I was a little confused about some of the stats for your mech and how they affected the gameplay. Some of the components would have stats that displayed very minimal changes but would have profound effects on the gameplay. Overall this is a minor complaint and I was able to figure out what I needed to do to get the most out of my mech.

Final Thoughts

I love this game, there are not a lot of games that I will play through multiple times but this is one of them.