Late to the Party: Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

ou know—some trends just don’t live past their 15 minutes of fame; Zombies? Played out, Vampires? Done to death, & Superheroes? We’re approaching terminal velocity on that can of worms soon, just give it some time. There are, however, some exceptions in Pop Culture that’ll just never NOT be rad as all hell, and one of those things is giant mech-suit robots.

Where mainstays of the genre like Gundam, Macross, and to some loose extent, Transformers have populated the public headspace in the genre, one particular property has commanded an underground yet dedicated peak of fandom in Video Games like no other IP specifically has—Armored Core.

Riding on the wave of new fandom that Dark Souls and Elden Ring have afforded them, FromSoftware unveiled the next entry in their long-dormant series that hasn’t seen a release in well over a decade with Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon and they’re giving it the red-carpet treatment to boot. This new release does ask an interesting question though; where its demanding twitchy-trigger gunplay carved out a modest niche of dedicated fans much like that of the “Soulsborne” series of games, those titles were able to steadily evolve and refine their gameplay hallmarks with the sort of resources that Armored Core has never had the privilege of receiving.

How exactly does Fires of Rubicon close such a long gap between releases without compromising the ardent quirks of its combat and difficulty? Well, it turns out that the answer is a lot easier than you’d think—Fires of Rubicon takes everything Armored Core V did and doubles down on it with all the technical performance the ninth generation of gaming hardware could afford the long-awaited sequel.

Forgive the bold start to the feature, but there’s a lot of ground to cover, and well, screw it—let’s take the unintended word-play there and jump into one of the biggest enhancement to the AC V foundation that instantly jumps out in the starting hours of Rubicon—the level design.

Gone are the secular arena-sized bits of real estate and cramped hallway routes that connect them; Fires of Rubicon will place players onto massive maps with intricate pieces of architecture and set pieces to navigate through, with a design that makes the environment feel like an actual world over it being a backdrop for a mission. The planet of Rubicon will take players across sprawling cityscapes, mountainsides, and ocean bases that aren’t wide-reaching in scale but crazy tall, with a sense of verticality the series has never seen before. Granted, the enhanced Y-axis of the playfield is a little daunting at first, as the majority of the series’ aerial maneuvers were contained to short somersaults and evasive half-gainers, but with AC VI it’s different. Players will be able to thrust five stories high and counting within seconds flat with the press of a button, and the physics behind that kind of momentum is impressively intuitive.

While there’s no direct control to descend, maneuvering between evasive thrusts and aerial ascents in a rhythm where you can effectively pilot serpentine movements between climbs and freefalls steadily becomes second nature in control, like letting off the gas pedal of a car driving downhill on a freeway. Ingratiating yourself with this new depth of verticality is important to progressing through Fires of Rubicon, gradually being the key to success after the early sets of missions. Enemies will start taking more to the skies, and the only way to avoid taking heavy fire is to launch into the air with them—and I honestly can’t tell you how good it felt to steer this new learning curve because of immaculate pacing that AC VI introduced this initially intimidating aspect with. To put it in other words, the director of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Masaru Yamamura, took charge of directing Fires of Rubicon from Hidetaka Miyazaki, and it totally shows, in a good way. While I have a ton of gripes with Sekiro that I’ll have to cover in another piece, the thing that I absolutely loved about that game is the immaculate ebb and flow of its movement, and that same sharp yet frenetic snap to its movement and physics is easily the best design that Armored Core has ever seen.

OK, so you can fly more, zipping around feels better in general, and there’s a bigger playground to do it all in—what about the white-knuckle firefights the series is known for you may ask.

Let me assure you that not only is all the pulse-pounding metal gladiator shit still here, but it’s been given a giant injection of creativity the franchise hasn’t seen in decades.

Get in the Armored Core VI Shinji, or FromSoftware might abandon the series again.Although Armored Core VI still has the search-and-destroy makeup to its mission objectives, many of them feature bespoke elements that really set them apart from one another to where each new mission is more unique than the last. One stage will take players on a siege against this labyrinthine giant walking "AT-AT" like mech that takes up a quarter of the map all to itself, pitting you with the task of scaling its intricate hull while fighting it like a Shadow of the Colossus boss. Another stage will throw Laser-targeting satellites over the field that fire unavoidable blasts every 10 seconds, forcing you to scramble for cover under any piece of scaffolding or bunker opening you can dive under before the bolts of electric death rain down on you. What about a Metroid-style self-destructing level escape sequence? Fires of Rubicon has it—a fog-shrouded level that impacts both visibility and lock-on targeting range/operation and makes enemy encounters 10 times more dangerous as a result—it’s there, and that barely scratches the surface of the variety that Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon has to offer.

Part-stage, part-boss—all fun.

How about a coherent premise that isn’t bogged down with ham-fisted lore dumps every ten minutes or so—Fires of Rubicon also delivers a gripping narrative that doesn’t get lost in its own exposition; something that the property arguably never had a good handle on before until now. Like any other dystopian industrial society does when it peaks towards the endgame of late-stage capitalism, humankind has discovered a new all-purpose energy source known as coral on a planet named Rubicon, jumpstarting a rat race to claim it. The factions in the struggle for the red power at large are mega corporations, rebel forces native to the planet fighting back against the commercialized manifest destiny, and ruthless mercenaries looking to cash in on violence from both sides. Enter the nameless protagonist without a past crash-landing on the Rubicon soil without rhyme or reason—a mystery man in the fight for coral who goes by “Handler Walter” takes you in, and exploits your circumstances for his gain as an indentured mercenary to his cause or asking price, under the call sign, Raven. As Raven starts to build a rep in Rubicon, they’ll get swept up in the messier politics of the war for coral, and what arms they decide to take up the deeper they dive into the global struggle is entirely at the player’s discretion.

As interesting as the campaign and its narrative is, AC is infamous for its grueling difficulty, and dense mech-building mechanics, and Fires of Rubicon doesn’t stray too far from those roots. The good news though is much in the same way players were walked through the expanded depth of aerial maneuvering, the difficulty-curve for pilots both new and rusty is just as smooth of the process to hit the ground running.

Don't be afraid to go alone when you can provolone!

Not too different from a Soulsborne title, the four main stats to construct your Armored Core around are armor points, defensive performance, attitude stability, and boost speed. Armor points are sci-fi for hit-points and function the exact same way, with defensive performance being the buffer to the damage you can sustain against said points. Attitude stability isn't as clear cut in name, but again, taking a cue from Soulsborne, it represents the strength behind your AC's "poise" in terms of how much concussive damage you can take before your mech is temporarily staggered, and left wide-open for a heavy assault. Boost speed is just as straightforward, as it'll determine the speed that you can pilot your Armored Core and the various evasive tactics you'll need you use against the never-ending Itano circuses you'll defend against on Rubicon. Boosting is also impacted by the various mech parts you swap out, and while heavier parts mean more armor points for your health, the extra weight will slow down the efficiency of your boost, and potentially do more harm than good in those moments where Raven’s handily outnumbered. That’s where picking the right build comes in, and yeah, previous entries made shopping for parts to upgrade your AC feel like a trip to O'Reilly Auto Parts without a clue in the world about what does what under the hood of your car—Fires of Rubicon is thankfully much more accessible with this aspect now.

The biggest enhancement comes in the form of a significantly more user-friendly interface for stat analysis and contrasting the various give-and-takes each part brings to your bipedal vessel. Every except is parsed in digestible bits that focus more on what the upgrade can offer without so much of the lore or minutiae that are typical of the Armored Core garage system, with added color-grading used on the dynamic reflection of the equipped part so you can see the risk/reward element of it in real-time as you cycle through the shop. Numbers can only do so much, and in an effort to respect player time whenever possible, there’s a practice session option available every time a new build combination is put together for players to easily experiment so you don’t have to gamble with your performance on the field. All of this, however, pales in comparison to what may be the biggest improvement to not just building your ideal AC but to the overall series itself—the infamously stupid, dumbass, shit-ass debt system is now a thing of the past. Gone are all the stressful mission runs with fallible objectives that you could put your wallet in the red and set you back hours to grind the necessary cash to pay your outstanding account balance just so you can finally get that crucial upgrade to carry you through the progressively harder campaign.  Now folks can develop their piloting skills throughout the growing gauntlet of AC VI’s campaign without any of the soul-crushing punishment or tedious save-scrumming that used to plague the Armored Core experience.

Even with all of these quality-of-life improvements though, FromSoftware penchant for tough-as-shit gameplay is still alive and well in Fires of Rubicon, and I can’t help but feel like the added depth of level design gives way to a slew of new dairy-grade cheese strategies to exploit some of its more challenging foes. As I mentioned before, the added element of mid-air combat lends a whole new depth to both the experience and challenge, but there are still limits to what certain Core builds can do when it comes to fueling their airstrikes, limiting the window of time they have to zip around with off or on the ground. Deploying a good grasp of stage-awareness means that a savvy player can lead their dance partner against a non-destructible wall, and pressure them in a corner like your spamming cheap Guile combos from Street Fighter II Championship Edition. Sure, it isn’t the most satisfying way to play, but like the Soulsborne games, even the most optimized builds for the mission can still get bodied within seconds, and at that point, why not make use of some bittersweet mozzarella to take the gold home—there’s really no shame in it, at least in my eyes anyway.

Despite the franchise being one of the oldest in FromSoftware’s résumé, Armored Core never really earned the prestige of its Fromsoft peers like Dark Souls or Bloodborne, or hell even mechsuit contemporaries in the subgenre like MechAssault, Gungriffon, and Front Mission. Fires of Rubicon though, as cliché as this may sound, is just built different—it revamps all of the trademark dynamics of the series, and optimizes them into an experience that I genuinely believe ANYONE can enjoy. Armored Core doesn’t have to be for the sickos to be great at what it does, and there’s no finer example of that sentiment then Fires of Rubicon—if there’s only one game you can play from the series, make sure this 2023 entry is it.