Even if you don’t give a good Gundam about giant robot games, there’s something you really ought to know about Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. Much like the titular coral fires which fanned across the cosmos, a rumour has been burned across the Internet about this being 50-60 hours long. From my personal experience, those numbers don’t add up.
A reasonably competent player can hit the end credits of Armored Core VI in 10 hours. And that would be doing every single optional training mission — as I did. That would also include S-ranking the optional Arena battles that sidecar the campaign — as I did. I’m also keeping in mind the hour I spent back-track grinding for money to buy parts.
A small caveat, though: this is a game with three possible endings. But, again, if you’re smart with your save backups, you can reload and milk maybe 3-4 more hours by making the Act 3 choices that’ll lead you down those paths not taken.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon Review
To be fair, there are a small handful of missions that will disappear if you select another. If you’re a super hardcore completionist who abhors save scumming, it’s conceivable that you’d want to NG+ this campaign to nibble on a small handful of sorties you didn’t get to see. But even then, that puts us well shy of that supposed 50-60 hour range.
Needless to say, if you’re looking for longevity in Armored Core VI, you’ll need to invest in the multiplayer mode.
For some of you robo-fans, this news is not gonna mech your day. Similarly, it’s not going to energise curious From Soft fans who have spent triple-digit hours “Elden Ringing” and are out to consume a similar-sized meal here.
Mind you, 10-odd hours – or a 20-hour play ‘n’ replay – is par for the course expectation if you’re an Armored Core fan from the PS2, PS3 or PS4 days like I am. Armored Core VI‘s length is more acceptable if you just wanna be told a serviceable tale as you shoot, slash, or spartan kick the crap out of other giant robots.
Oh, and speaking of slightly misguided Souls expectations, there are a couple of other things you newcomers ought to know before you buy in. The brutality you crave does technically exist in Armored Core VI‘s one-size-fits-all difficulty, but it’s fleeting and sporadic as opposed to a constant trial by fire of… Rubicon.
What we have here is what I like to call the “first hurdle” difficulty. During the initial gasp, you’re poor, railroaded into piloting an Armored Core that has all the martial prowess of Disney-Pixar’s Wall-E, and you’re learning a complex control scheme. At this point in the proceedings, Armored Core VI will make a meal out of many of you.
However, beat that opening boss, replay some missions for monies, and make some smart weapon purchases, and Armored Core VI will actually mellow out for long stretches. From then on out, every third or fourth boss might be an absolute C-Weapon, and require a checkpoint reload or a slight strategy rethink. It’s absolutely not the controller-throwing equal of its Soulsborne stablemates.
What it is, however, is bloody good fun with bloody big guns. Action-wise, I haven’t been this hooked by bot-on-bot violence since I grabbed the twin sticks of a Virtual On arcade cabinet in 1996.
More on fisticuffs in a second, though. I should at least try to set the stage with some plot overview. Not-so-long story short, the planet of Rubicon is this universe’s answer to Dune / Arrakis. The thing making things spicy here is an incredibly powerful (and also near-apocalyptically dangerous) resource called coral.
And great barrier reef, do people want to kill for it.
As 621, a faceless, voiceless, bred-for-purpose “hound”, you’ll be snuck into this inter-corporate war for coral. Over the course of many contained sandbox missions, you’ll work your way up from being a mongrel merc dogsbody to the hottest Winston Wolf problem-solver on the planet. Your expertise will be sought from no fewer than four different factions, who have their own Machiavellian schemes on how the coral should be used. Cue: some rare decision branch missions that quickly wind back to the main trunk of the campaign anyway.
Even if you’re a five-games-deep fan like myself, you’re going to be lost in the opening act. Armored Core VI is a fresh story that’s unattached to previous titles, but it’s also a blur of faction names and often bizarre call signs. Carving out your own legend and making your smarmy corpo handlers eat their insults delivers satisfaction – I dug this ride much more than I thought I would. But it has to be said that From Soft opting to tell its tale through nothing but audio messages and logs, makes identifying the major players and moving parts of this much more difficult.
Speaking of parts and making things needlessly impenetrable, expect to have a period of head-scratching in the Armored Core VI Assembly and/or Shop menus. According to From Soft, customising your robo-ride is crucial to success on the battlefield — if you can decipher all the model number gibberish. Presumably in an effort to give this universe more history and weight, obtuse names are given to all the potential parts that make up the 8 swappable bits of your AC frame, and the four configurable weapon pods that hold your attitude-adjusters.
Expect a ton of squinting at the screen as you try to figure out if a DF-GN-02 LING-TAI is in fact better than the DF-GN-06 MING-TANG in terms of EN Charge, EN Capacity or weight. You’ll ask yourself similar questions when selecting your hand-gripped or shoulder-mounted guns. “Hmmm, if I carry the 1 and divide by the square root of 12, is the BML-G1/P20MLT-04 going to provide more metric pew-pew than the BML-G1/P31DUO-02?”
The answer to those questions — without using a convenient item compare system, because the one here really does require flicking back and forth between assembly, equipping, and shop menu — is trial-and-error the bastard. According to my reviewer’s guide, From Soft expects you to make a wild guess as to what’s coming, slog through the traversal / minor enemy phase of a mission, and bash yourself against a boss until you figure ‘em out. Or rage-quit.
The bad news here: exiting any mission prematurely will throw you right back to the start. And while you can use checkpoints infinitely within the mission and rebuild your AC before you respawn, you may only use parts — and this is complete game logic here — “brought with you.”
Yup. If you can’t Frankenstein yourself into a “better you” out in the field, you have to lose all progress to exit the mission to go back to the shop. You and I have never met, so I don’t know how armoured you are, emotionally, but that’d irritate me to my core.
Fortunately, but also kind of disappointingly, I seemed to luck into this incredible, jack-of-all-trades AC build. Eschewing the caterpillar tank and hexapod leg designs, I stuck to a svelte, Tekkaman bullet-dodger who was bristling with plasma-spewing… everything. To stay effective, I was forced to (briefly) change my weapons for one boss. I also rethought my armour pieces twice for zippier movement.
Once again, I’m not sure if that was a freak stroke of luck. But I was hoping to be pushed into super-granular AC building because I’m a masochistic weirdo. But be that as it may, I quickly became “house proud” of my highly customised, EVA-001-coloured AC. Its callsign? “Plenty of Nerv.”
Likewise, combat was always satisfying and just the right level of complex. I very much needed the extra paddles of my DualSense Edge to better trigger dodging/rollerblading (Circle) and vertical thrusting (Cross). Being able to drift through skyscraper-thick streets and jack-in-the-box up onto targets like Jaws…man, that felt cool. Similarly, most bosses come from the 7th layer of Bullet Hell, so out-homing missiles with that maneuverability put a bigger smile on my dial.
What we have here is a delicate bullet ballet of managing three crucial systems. Firstly, if you don’t want to become a sitting duck, your ‘twizzling about’ must be done sensibly within your allotted boost cooldown timer. Exceed it, and you’ll have to float helplessly to Earth, looking like the most metal Mary Poppins imaginable.
Secondly, you have to keep reasonable pressure on your enemy’s stagger-state AC bar, while protecting your own at all costs. Thirdly, you need to keep your heavy hitters manually reloaded and ready to maximise the pain when said enemy goes punch-drunk.
The violence here is not all good vibes. That bullshit game logic comes back in a few boss fights. For arbitrary reasons, the considerable-sized sandbox you’re in can become locked down with invisible barriers. No-go zones which, infuriatingly, can be retreated into by melee-prone bosses. Once there, sometimes they’ll rain more fireworks on you than NYE 1999.
Beyond that, I was very impressed with the array of armaments and tactics on offer. Any mecha dream-build from your dorkiest fantasies can be recreated here. You can configure yourself to be anything, from a glass-cannon sniper beast to a sword-swinging Voltron berserker. Hell, you can just coat yourself in hot pink and plonk down on the battlefield as a big bertha weapons platform not unlike the Crushinator from Futurama.
Essentially, what I’m trying to tell you is that Armored Core VI delivers on the action side of things. What a pity then, that the same care hasn’t been lavished upon its functional yet utilitarian visuals (which are all explosions and special effects, set against drab, scrappy-looking cityscapes whose details don’t stand up to passing scrutiny). And, obviously, it’s the same problem with a campaign that’s shorter than Astro Boy.
Taken as another Armored Core in a series of, I think this is a better-than-usual addition to the franchise. I had hoped, however, that more of the learning, a bigger budget and a bolder spirit of innovation from From Soft’s other successes could have been bolted onto this frame somehow.
At the end of the evaluation, Armored Core VI may stand as the best at what it does in its particular arena, but that’s largely due to a lack of stiff competition. From could have assembled something truly S ranked here, but didn’t.
Armored Core VI was reviewed on PC using digital code provided by the publisher.
