As most people know, I’m a huge From fan. When they announced that they were doing a new Armored Core, I was pretty excited about it–even though I’m not into sci-fi nor mechs. It’s FromSoft. I trust them implicitly. I thought the trailers were all fire, but…
I’ll say it. I knew I probably wouldn’t gel with it from the start. I know me and for better or worse, I am not into sci-fi or mechs. I don’t care about that. At all. But it was From, so I was going into it with an open mind.
It came out and I installed it. I was exicted, but in the back of my mind, I had the thought that it probably wouldn’t be for me. I hoped that wasn’t the case, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were.
To be perfectly blunt, I knew I wasn’t going to get along with it. Even though I was hyped. Even though it was FromSoft. Even though it looked slick as hell. Even though everyone in the RKG Discord was thrilled about it.
I tried it out and was meh about it. Again, being honest. It was ok, but it wasn’t really grabbing me. Not because of the game itself–it was doing what it was supposed to do. But it just wasn’t my thing. Which was ok, but made me sad because I so wanted it to be my thing. I want everything FromSoft to be my thing. I did a quick look here, and I was mildly enthusiastic about it. But, even then, it was very tempered.
When I hit the tutorial boss, I realized just how much this game was going to test me. Below, I included a video by OutsideXbox, and Andy has some of the same complaints I did about the boss. One, that he can go outside the warning signs (meaning you’ve left the playable area), but you can’t. It’s understandable because the boss is so big, but it’s irritating. Two, that the lock-on breaks if you swing the camera too quickly–which, let’s face it, you’re going to do. Only with the boss, though. Even when I had the lock-on, if I boosted towards the boss, I would…simply go by it.
Oh, and there are two boost buttons. I’m not entirely clear why. One is a combat boost button and one is just a boost-boost. I can’t deal with that, especially in the heat of combat.
Another thing about the boss fight that I didn’t understand was how at one point in the fight, your handler told you that you had gotten what you needed, but you had to ‘clean up’ the rest. Meaning, ‘kill’ the boss. Also, I couldn’t read its health bar or know how much health it had. But even when I did the first part pretty flawlessly, the second part (clean up) dragged on and on and on until I died by attrition. I wasn’t doing anything differently, and maybe that was the issue. I also don’t know how I actually killed it.
It was after the tutorial boss fight and I moved onto other missions, though, that my deficiencies really came to the forefront. I was talking to Ian about the game and saying that I hated how you take a hit on HP if you fall to your death. He said that he didn’t know you COULD fall to your death. I said you could if you were me and could not gauge how far it was from one platform to another, wasted energy, and couldn’t make it. In other words, falling in between the platforms.
Interestingly enough, the first mission I did after the tutorial boss, I had little difficulty with. Then I upgraded my weapons, went back to do it again, and died twice. I know that your build is important in this game, but I had no idea why the bigger and better weapon was so much shittier in that situaotion.
I have to admit that I was not happy when I unlocked the garage. I know that changing your loadout is so important, but I just…don’t care. Here’s another thing about me. I don’t play shooter games. I did play and enjoy Borderlands and Borderlands 2 to a certain extent, but that was it. I hated Borderlands 3, BTW.
So. Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon is everything I dislike in a game. You need spatial awareness, the ability to do several things at once, guns, mechs, and sci-fi. There is not one thing in that which speaks to me. I did dip into the garage, but I felt so lost. I know nothing about guns or what is a good one. I can tell that something costs more so it should probably be better, but I can’t really tell by the descriptions. Also, I am not a min-maxer, so that’s stressful to me as well.
It was a new mission, though, in which I gave up. I kept dying from falling between platforms, and it was not enjoyable to me. You get a huge chunk of health taken away when you die in this manner, and I just did not have the bandwidth to deal with that. It was already a hard enough game for me, and I didn’t need it to be more difficult. I know it’s not meant to be hard in a Souls way, but I found it harder in a sense because the issues I had with it were not things I could actually overcome.
I can’t get better spatial perception. I can’t make it so my reflexes are better. There are ways to get around that in the Souls games/Elden Ring, but that’s just not available to me in this game. Or if it is, I haven’t figured it out–and I don’t have the desire to figure it out.
I’m ok with it not being a game for me. I have to be because From doesn’t believe in accessibility. That is one knock against them, by the way. They put no effort into the classic accessibility choices, and I do hope they will evolve on that issue in the fucture. Not to put in an easy mode, per se, but to include things like auto-snap for lock-on, for example.
I’m done with the game for now. Will I go back to it at some point? Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath.