It’s a brilliant meta-commentary mirroring the precarious state of mind the main character has that could crack at any moment with only the slightest provocation. Yes, that must be why the game itself will just crash every two hours and lose all your progress for no reason.

Probably would have given 4.5 stars if it wasn’t for that. I was in the middle of a long late game sequence and it happened right after a hard check I finally passed. Absolutely infuriating horseshit.

Also I’ll be very honest, for all the wild turns this game takes, the one thing that I still think about more than anything else is why they censor the f-slur (especially when there’s so many other naughty words put to good use, including the r-slur 😬) Really, why? You have this gritty world full of mean people who say mean things, why the line drawn in the sand here? We all know what the dumb twelve year old kid is saying. Go ahead, game, you can say it. Faggot. I’m a big boy, I’ve been to middle school before, I can handle it! And yeah, I can accept that some people can’t, but then the thing to do is not write that usage in the game in the first place. No one who’s going to be triggered by this game is going to feel any relief that there’s a beep instead! “Wonder what word was supposed to be there? Could have been any of them, really 🤷‍♂️”

I did a quick search and found some people saying it’s hidden until you complete the “homosexual underground” thought, which would have been neat. Except you better bet your bottom ass I completed that thought, first of all, and second, having done so I can confirm this is not the case, as a certain very-communist character near the endgame has some certain very sweeping opinions on the bourgeois. I just don't get it…

I don't know how to go about writing my thoughts on the most critically acclaimed game on Backloggd. How daunting of a task is that?! Especially when, to put it politely, I hold a dissenting opinion. And maybe the only one ever about this game. So, instead of trying, I'm going to copy and paste all the notes I frantically jotted down when I finally finished it at 1:30 in the morning, a play session that was bookended by work the night before and work the following morning. Feel free to read, critique, or ignore at your leisure.


So much irrelevancy to the case
Very frustrating for me in particular. I am not a Skyrim gamer. I do not appreciate when side quests take so much spotlight away from the main quest.
I want to solve this murder. Anything that isn't directly related to that is worthless to me (outside of getting xp). Why should I bother painting walls, looking for imaginary bugs, starting a night club, exploring cursed buildings, attempting to persuade a cargo container to open, or any number of other quests that I never did?
Even the history and world building of Revachol often distracts from the case, although these often provide motivations for key characters and establish the tone of the world, so I'm more forgiving of it. Even if I skim through the details and forget them immediately afterwards.


The ending is amazing
I appreciate how many quests are neatly brought together and wrapped up in the end. It still does not justify the time spent on the quests since they are optional, regardless of how seamlessly they bolster the ending
That said, I love the phasmid


Very respectable above all else
A game that dares to talk about serious subject matter (politics, long-term consequences of our actions/allegiances, corruption, racism, rape victims)
A game that doesn't need to "game-ify" itself with marketable clichés, and is confident in its own identity
A game thats gameplay is reading , yet still embraces interactivity and its inspiration in table-top mechanics to make it something only possible in this medium
Is it the best example of something like this in the medium? No. But it's the exact kind of game that we need more of


The voice acting is stellar, especially the narrator, even if the deliveries often lack a natural-feeling speaking pace.
And also thank god for it, I could not imagine playing through all of this without voice acting


Concept of allegiances is a little half-baked in my opinion. Like, sure narratively maybe my political allegiances say something about me as a player or about my character or some larger thing about my political allegiance itself or the corruption of police, whatever. But at the end of the day, my sole objective is to solve a murder. With a game with this many branching dialogue options, what information I choose to disclose or not disclose to other characters is important, and as this game often shows, people are easily manipulated. Saying the right thing in the right way to the right people gets me to my objective faster. My perception is that my precinct thinks I'm a joke anyway, how much influence over their reputation could my actions possibly have? I guess I think that what politics I choose to "side with" doesn't actually have as much impact as the game thinks it does. What if I just want to role play as a cop who lies? Do the means justify the ends? Does that make me corrupt? Who cares about what a drunk, disgraced cop does anyway? I have no significance here. So long as I can do my job, nothing else matters


I think the game is undeniably pretentious. Maybe its the point? Being an amnesiac protagonist is so overdone, and the ending kinda deus ex machinas some bullshit excuses about why I have the potential to be a complete god at everything despite what an ugly, pathetic, sack of shit I am. The whole limbic system, reptile brain, shenanigans of spouting hopeless cynicism about life circumstances I have no idea about is very pretentious. Please stop attempting to overstimulate and impress me with overly detailed writing and your enormous dictionary and preaching to me the relatively shallow, cynical, and nihilistic perspective on life and the world (the expression, my mysterious ex-lover, all my internal systems, etc.)


Easily save-scummable, disappointingly so. I wish the game would incentivize living with your failed checks in a better way


Game lies to you. Don't know if I like that. I like how it encouraged you to take agency over you interactions with the game and not just exhaustively explore every possible game interaction. It's good for storytelling as well as thought-provoking gameplay decisions. On the other hand, it's stupid. The game constantly encourages you to do things that are in your least interest, and can sometimes feel like a cheap trick or slap on the wrist for not knowing better. Maybe it's even a little demeaning.


The writing is great. No denying that. Very detailed, communicates multiple perspectives well (thoughts/characters). Dialogue is always believable given what we know about the people. The characters are all surprisingly memorable and distinct, despite the large cast.
All that said, a work cannot be saved on writing alone. The pacing is often awful. Every time we meet a new character or find a new area, we have to spend half an hour learning everything they have to say/it has to see. It exponentially worsens the game when you factor for how irrelevant many quests are
Maybe just my playstyle? don't care. Also it's kind of the entire game, and in your best interest to do so, so no, not just my playstyle. I can't justify "oh just don't talk to/click on everything/one." Not engaging with a game is not justification for it doing something poorly


No humor. A little light-heartedness goes a long way to investing me in these people and the world they inhabit that make the tragic moments hit harder

I love Kim (and Titus)
I wish you talked with Kim on the balcony and reflected every night


Characters dying has little impact. Mechanically the only difference is that you can no longer talk with characters, but I feel like that doesn't matter, as many characters I have little interaction with anyway. I found it more impactful when Lisa and Morrell left after failing to discover the phasmid. They felt more "gone" that the characters who died


I believe most of my criticisms are criticisms about the game at its core, which is an unusual perspective for me. Ordinarily my criticism of a game (at least one I ultimately enjoy, if only partially), comes from how the game ultimately feels misguided or strays in some way (Chrono Trigger, Nier: Replicant, Zelda: MM & WW, Donkey Kong Country, Persona 5, Mother 3, Shadow of the Colossus, Owlboy). Otherwise I just hate it/feel indifferent about it.


My appreciation for this will definitely grow, and I may be persuaded to love it more


I feel like Ace Attorney challenged my understanding of the case and was a more effective "detective" game than this. I mostly went with the flow here
The game doesn't really give you suspects. You don't find out who the culprit is until you meet him for the first time. This isn't a detective game about narrowing down a list of suspects. It's a detective game about getting as much information as possible from everyone, and they all seem detached from the act itself. Even the Hardie boys who straight up confess to it. This isn't necessarily a criticism, but something I thought about a few days after playing.

Disco Elysium is undeniably one of the most concentrated, and achieved, works to focus on individual introspection on the most granular level. It’s clear about it from the get go, it begins with a typical RPG character builder, then an inner dialogue, with the background of a pitch black screen, then the first steps in the game in a cramped hotel room, where the inner voices will be your first companions, and finally the first long dialogue tree being established with, of course, a mirror. There is an important detail revealed in this first contact, the main character doesn’t remember anything, not even his own name. If there is not a memory, not a past, only one thing remains, the current self. The absence and rediscovery of identity flow in a perpetual conversation from our protagonist to the whole of Martinaise and back.

Though its RPG abstractions may seem childish at first (and they are, as in imaginative), the game creates a system to represent the particular human being through their various voices/traits. It zooms into what seemed to be already atomic and divides again. It may look like a total misunderstanding of something that is impossible to classify, let alone gamify, though, the brilliance is in being unashamed of its decision, of using the system as a means to construct the being, and not as a goal.

The presence of a layer of humor helps to ease its mechanical premise, and it won’t take long to be delighted with the flavor that each voice has. This same humor helps to introduce its devastated world. Disco Elysium’s premise is an easy subject to throw in the misery well, yet the total opposite occurs. The at first chaotic mind of our detective turns out to be the perfect lenses through which to discover an hypersensorial world where each corner and conversation is a suggestive sign of life, past or present, still palpable regardless. As our job is that of a detective, our instinct will be of adventuring, exploring and, of course, talking. The conversations are soon revealed as labyrinths where each character traces a glimpse of their own world. A world so present and so alive in so many people that their existence and their connection end up weaving the tapestry that is the true human life of seemingly dead Martinaise.

The game is insistent on searching for life in the home of death. A commercial mall where no store survives becomes the place for a woman to give birth to roleplaying dice, even if the roleplayers and game makers are gone too. An abandoned church becomes the home of the night raves of the youth that wants to connect with the ethereal in their own terms. The human vitalism is evident, the melancholy of Disco Elysium is noticing that the unstoppable external interests to exploit Martinaise inevitably permeate every one of these lives.

After life -- death;
After death -- life again.

Armored Core 6 is pretty easy and pretty shallow for an Armored Core game. Those two things are not necessarily bad; AC6 is probably the only AC game I'd recommend that isn't weirdly obtuse about everything. But AC6 slims things down to the point of losing some of the intricacy of its predecessors, and it creates a less interesting build experience. A less player-intensive experience, combined with AC6's easier levels and focus on 'monster' bosses, does not leave enough room for skill growth to allow players to become their own 'style' of master AC pilot. That is to say, AC6 is so easy and focused on scripted game beats that players do not get to express themselves as much in-game. If Armored Core's biggest problems are esoterica and difficulty, then Armored Core 6 over corrects for these issues. I look forward for the pendulum swinging back the other direction while I mad-rush S ranks like I need the COAM in my blood.

I really tried to see what other people are seeing in this game but while I enjoyed the game overall the difficulty balancing and the combat left me with mixed feelings.

The experience of playing AC6 is valleys of boredom induced by tepid mission design that poses zero threat to the player interspersed with massive difficulty spikes from set piece bosses a la Souls games. It's incredibly uneven and frankly baffling that this made it into a commercial game in 2023. This problem is extremely pervasive and negatively affects what I assume is the core appeal of AC: the customization. The ideal should be that you can create your personal mech and change weapons when problems arise for it with a variety of solutions that are viable and fun. But once a wall hits you and you start experimenting with the weapons, you realize only a small selection of weaponry is good enough to defeat the difficulty spikes without taking obscene amounts of time(i ran out of ammo on bosses even when i wasn't using the "correct" build). I am sure there is other ways to do it, this is my first AC after all and it's very likely I'm missing some build or specific weapon usage, but I couldn't find anything better than an extremely stagger heavy build with high damage weapons(like shotguns). You can beat the whole game with this setup and everything else i tried felt terrible to use in comparison. This made the customization of the game feel pointless to me. What's the point of customizing further when most content is steamrolled regardless of your mech and bosses require such high DPS and stagger? That's what i mean by the difficulty balancing issue being pervasive. It compromises what I assume is the appeal of AC.

I think one of the contributing factors to the limited feeling customization in AC6 is how stagger was implemented. If you are doing DPS and the enemy isn't staggered, you are basically just doing chip damage. Which is fine against AC's, but when you are against the set piece bosses it feels terrible. They simply have far too much HP to not feel like endurance tests rather than engaging fights. So staggering is the best strategy against most boss encounters. I also think stagger on the player just feels bad. You get punished extremely hard by being forced to stand still for a second which is death on lighter mechs. Stagger as a mechanic should have stayed in Sekiro.

Despite all of this, The AC duels are really fun. You can actually customize meaningfully in a personalized manner and still have fun! The fights are fast, brutal, and frantic and it's how i imagined AC was going to be. If the entire game was just AC fights I wouldn't have any complaints besides the stagger, which unfortunately still plays a role in these fights. Regardless, the arena and the story AC fights are the best parts of the game bar none. The fantasy of being a skilled mecha pilot was truly realized here.

Back onto the mission design, i think that it would have been vastly improved if they had attrition elements and resource management baked into the game's systems. Apparently previous AC games had you make financial decisions and struggle with debt which I find more interesting than what we got. There's no struggle with ammo management, you can sell parts for 100% refund, and you get obscene amounts of money from most missions. All this make me feel like money is a waste of time in this game. All it does is save you from menuing more often when you accumulate a lot of it. As for the ammo management, it makes every mission just spray and prey with no thought involved, especially since you take very little damage. Since the mission design is so trivial, they should have put these elements back in so there is some element of conflict going on here. As is it's extremely boring and easy. The lack of meaningful exploration and encounter design also really doesn't help.


I do quite like the feel of the mecha in this game, and the story isn't half bad once the real plot starts going on in the last third of the game. I also think the aesthetics are on point, the blazing sky illuminating hellish abominations of machinery and metal are quite striking and the mecha designs are pretty sick. I complained a lot in this review but I still enjoyed enough to say that I think the game is alright. But It's certainly the weakest fromsoft game I've played. It feels like a janky PS2 game in all the good ways and bad ways with a sloppy implementations of modernization on top of it that hurt the experience more than it helps.

Eh.

That's really the core of how I feel about this game: Eh.

Before I go ahead, I'll lay my cards on the table.

I am an AC fan, but I wouldn't call myself a passionate one. I gunned the series in 2011 in preparation for Armored Core V (second-hand hype from a friend, you see) and moved on. A few years later, I did it again and fell in love with both AC4 and For Answer. Despite this love, AC has always been a C-lister as far as franchises I care about go, so I don't have too much personal investment in it.

AC6 is alright in some areas. Mech options are great, AC vs AC fights are toptier, music is exceptional, and it's pretty. I liked the ending fights and some of the story beats, really. This is a decent AC game, sometimes.

Unfortunately, this game succumbs to death by a thousand cuts as far as annoyances go. Some are pretty significant and near-omnipresent, while others are minor but still irritating.

I will talk about this game as two separate titles: AC6 - The Armored Core sequel, and AC6 - the Souls game.

I know some of you will groan at that, perhaps due to astroturfing by AC fans insisting that this game will be 'pure', or the devs' own insistence that they didn't bother including any Souls stuff. I believed both of them until I played the game.

As an AC title, AC6 sometimes has moments where it feels like the developers just get it. You're plonked in front of a gauntlet of enemies and silently told 'time to run it, nerd'. In these moments, the developers remember that AC as a series is first and foremost a puzzle game, with your mech potentially being the solution. Early on, these sections are a bit droll since enemies can't really hurt you and you oneshot them, but the threat level amps up later on and leads to some really engaging missions. The final missions on the route I chose were the peak of this, and are some of the finest in the series.

Unfortunately, they had no faith in their own game design, it seems. I know some more hardcore AC fans hate Repair Kits, but I don't - in theory, they allow the game to hit you with longer missions than the older games without you getting worn down just by sheer attrition, and it removes the demand for perfect play.

The actual issue is that the game introduces Repair Kits on top of both checkpoints and free trips to the Assembly when you die.

Despite the game and its tutorials insisting you should be adaptable and flexible in your construction, there's simply no need to do this. You can just beat your head against an immediate threat, hit a checkpoint, and switch to a completely different AC to tackle the next one. Or, get a consequence-free resupply before a boss. It completely torpedoes the need to make versatile builds, and oftentimes it's better to simply veer into the extremes of the speedy-tanky spectrum.

Also, a minor aside that I have no idea where to insert: Turning speed is still a stat but it has no bearing on your actual camera turn speed, leading to cases where you're locked onto an enemy but can't fire because your AC is still turning. It's... Strange? I feel like it was a decision made to make some fights clearer, but the end result is more annoying than anything.

Anyway, that's the AC portion of AC6 done with. Let's talk about the Dark Souls portion.

It is painfully, agonizingly obvious that parts of this game were - intentionally or not - designed to mimic the Souls formula.

There are two types of bosses in this game. The first are enemy Armored Cores. These are great. They're where the game excels with no-catches. They're fast, frantic and intense, doing enough damage to make you sweat but not enough to do 15k of HP damage in one attack. Each AC fight is a wonderful back and forth, and even the harder ones never really bothered me. Once I got gud, they were just pure instinct; dodging, countering and trading like my controller was part of my nervous system. True to form, seeing another AC pop up in the pre-boss cutscene was a delight. If every boss was these, I would give this game an easy 5/5.

The second type are Souls bosses. I'm not saying this due to the bosses being hard - because they're not. They're frustrating more than anything. Logically, they make sense: If AC missions are puzzle-gauntlets, then it's only natural the bosses are puzzles too, right?

Well, no. The Souls bosses are too much like their namesake, boasting obscene hitboxes and overtuned damage. While the AC fights will whittle you down and occasionally hit you with something painful, Souls bosses will decimate your HP and ACS (stagger) gauge with impunity.
Up above, I said that it was better to pick one extreme of the fragile-tanky spectrum and commit to it. With Souls bosses, it sometimes feels as though going fast is the only option. Tanky builds are simply too slow to dodge the bullet hell many bosses dump on you. Fuck dude, even faster builds get clipped by a few missiles.

Yes, there are ways to dodge a lot of these attacks, but nearly every Souls boss I fought in this game had a nasty habit of vaulting to the opposite side of the arena and unleashing one. Assault Boost did nothing, and even building for Quick Boost (dodge) resulted in me losing 30% health regardless. At first, I assumed it was just me. That the bosses were fine and I simply sucked.

But fortunately you can just replay bosses rather than having to NG+. So I experimented, practiced, made new builds, got gud and... Yes, the Souls bosses are just badly designed. They're an attempt by FromSoft to capture the spectacle of their more recent titles but without adjustments for the kind of game Armored Core is. This is especially obvious with a certain lategame boss, who myself and all of my IRL friends coined "Robot Malenia" independently. They are miserable, and I am deeply happy that the final boss of each ending is an AC fight. I know some will refute this, because every 'hard game' has people insisting that there's no such thing as bad design and that detractors are just bad, but no. These bosses are terrible, even when they work. When they don't (BALTHEUS), they're even worse.

I wish the Souls influence ended at the bosses. Instead, it affects the levels too. Not all of them, mercifully, but a fair chunk of them.

An average AC level is, as described above, a puzzle gauntlet. You spawn into an area with clearly visible enemies and have to carve the best path through while avoiding overexpenditure of ammo or loss of health. Sometimes the formula deviates, like with an escort mission or a stealth mission, but the core (hehe) is the same.

AC6 adds Souls levels to the formula. They're 'open' levels wherein the only real threat is ambushes. Endless ambushes. Ambushes from above, below, behind, in front, ambushes. It is every meme about Scholar of the First Sin made manifest. The very first one is kind of cool, in part because it has the Souls geography but the AC encounter design. It soon goes to shit, though. Towards the end there's 3 of these levels back to back and they feel like Miyazaki taunting me for believing the people who said there'd be no Souls in my AC. They're not even hard, just annoying. I personally love it when I interact with a combat log and immediately take 2000 damage from enemies that spawned in and used their heavier attack before I could humanely react.

The sad part here is that while the Souls bosses are a decent recreation of their source material - down to the awful canyon wide hitboxes - the levels are not. Ambushes are all they have, and their open space is filled with nothing. Occasionally, very rarely, you'll find a data log or a part, but these are few in number. In the early levels, there basically aren't any, which is a good way to condition players to ignore exploration and in turn miss out on some great AC components.

You might find my fixation on the Souls elements exhausting, and truth be told I agree with you. But the simple fact of the matter is that the Souls elements are hamfistedly shoved into the game in ways that're deeply annoying, and the Armored Core elements are just okay. For FromSoft's big return to their niche mecha darling, I frankly expected more - and I tend not to expect things hands down.

I could talk about the story, but it's merely there. It's alright. It didn't evoke any strong feelings or thoughts. Truthfully it was fairly predictable; if you're familiar with common sci-fi tropes, have played Daemon x Machina or have a pattern-seeking brain, you'll probably figure it all out by Chapter 2. As early as Chapter 3, I called all four of the major plot twists - one of which is NG+ exclusive.

It's told to you through stiff cutscenes, scenes of two characters talking vaguely, radio calls and exposition. And... All of it sucks, because the voice acting sucks. It's stilted, half-hearted, utterly droll and oftentimes goes on too long. It feels like the Three Houses cast reading someone else's fanfiction, just utterly droll. You have fucking Patrick Seitz in a main role and waste him like this? Come on.

It pains me to rag on this game so hard, because I direly wanted a modern AC game. An AC game where FromSoft dumped their newfound expertise, technical prowess and fat stacks of cash into.

Instead, they just dumped Sekiro into AC and called it a day.

[Post-google docs edit; Hi, that last line was just me kvetching about the game design, but it turns out AC6 was directed by a guy that was a design lead on Sekiro, so. Hey.]

Earlier this year, I played most Armored Core bar the PS3 games in anticipation for this game, though not really out of pure hype, but because I was curious what bedrock of design From Software was working with. I didn’t expect to like them much, as I'm not a big mecha fan and I rarely hear high praise for its gameplay, but I was pleasantly surprised. Armored Core had a great niche in which fast movement did not mean great flexibility. You can boost around at high speeds, but your ability to turn and aim is limited by your mech’s legs and your FCS Lockbox. It was an incredibly compelling way to design a console shooter in which traditional aiming was not the main skill, but instead the usage of movement and positioning to supplement your limited tank controls was heavily emphasized. It tickled a very different part of the brain than most games usually do, and this is not without getting into how deep and detailed the mech-building was and the way in which it very directly affected how you control and move with your AC.

I felt very positive towards Oldgen AC as a whole in spite of some issues with mission design, but I also felt like there was no chance FromSoft could replicate any of this. The core conceit of the system after all was limited and unintuitive controls. Without it, none of this would work, and in the year of our lord 2023 we’ve already had a couple releases whos primary objective to sand off anything awkward to the modern gamer even if it leaves glaring flaws in the design (looking at you, Resident Evil 4 Remake) so I prepared myself for Armored Core 6 to not really reach those same heights.

Having played it now, I can call it decent as a brainless mecha-themed action game, though only decent, as even on those metrics it is greatly brought down by poor balancing and some core mechanic weaknesses. It had cool spectacle, and the music was occasionally good, and the plot had enough intrigue going on with answerable questions if you cared to find hidden data logs. The challenge that some bosses give at the beginning was interesting, and I particularly liked the Ibis Chapter 4 boss, who moved too fast to brainlessly shoot at, demanding you wait for openings and keep closing the distance to make sure your shots don't ricochet. Though unfortunately that challenge faded and never returned, even as I completed the supposedly extra difficult content of NG++ and attempted to nerf my own builds to allow the game to shine more while it had the chance, and FromSoft missed the chance of fix Armored Core’s long standing issue of boring mission design, which in some ways is made even worse as they are all made much shorter and less demanding and ammo/repair costs feeling like a complete non-factor to the mission gameplay thus failing to incentivize you to play around saving costs.

The game’s greatest virtue in my opinion is the mech creation sandbox and how much flexibility you have with the ability to place numerous decals anywhere and change the material type of the different metals all over the mech. You can create some very beautifully rendered custom mecha in this game and it makes it easy to get attached to your particular creation if you put some effort into them, and I think that alone can definitely carry a playthrough of this game. However, that about sums up all the nice things I have to say about the game. The actual gameplay suffers and does not justify replaying the game three times to see all the content, and that's what the rest of this review will be dedicated towards.

One of the core issues that hurts this game’s vision is the Stagger system. It acts like a simplified but more extreme version of the Heat mechanic from the older games, however the changes made to it hurt the game’s balance severely. Armored Core 6 rewards the player exponentially for adopting a burst damage based playstyle, often turning fights into complete stomps in favor of the player once you put on a shotgun or grenade launcher. In contrast, anything that doesn't include some form of burst feels heavily undertuned and weak, try playing assault rifles in this game and you will have a bad time for multiple reasons. The issue is twofold here and I will be using it to segue into my other issue with the game’s design.
Stagger leaves the enemy open to critical damage for a small window, and so in order to take advantage of that window, some kind of burst damage is sorely needed. Building Stagger bar itself is also primarily dependent on the damage being dealt, and this makes it so slow damage over time weapons often are bad at causing stagger too, whereas burst damage options will both inflict Stagger very fast while also allowing you deal massive amounts of damage during the window. Finding a build that allows you to take advantage of the stagger system to a reasonable degree while also not completely invalidating the enemies is a far far more challenging task than anything in the game itself. But why balance it like this? Why are Shotguns so obscenely strong?? I suspect the answer to that lies in them being carryovers from Old AC design without much consideration put into how their power changes when the core limitations of tank controls were removed.

In Old-Gen AC, options like a shotgun or a stationary rockets/grenades were much harder to line up the shot for due to the nature of tank controls and FCS. This especially was felt with Shotguns, which demanded you to stick up close to an enemy to get worthwhile damage, which in Oldgen this meant that you were consciously moving into a range where you cannot track your target very well as they can move much faster than you can turn around to chase them, and thus lining up the shot properly took a lot of skill and finesse. Your movement needed to make up for your limited turning and made it so your ability to deal high damage was highly reliant on moving in smart ways, but this conflicted with the demands brought on by needing to dodge enemy attacks and keep yourself out of their sights. This created an incredibly complex dance of challenging priorities that made the high damage feel earned once you manage to land the shots.
However, in the world of Armored Core 6, the mechs are blessed with hard-lock auto aim and insta turning around, nearly all your shots will land, the negligible drawbacks of hard-lock are not felt whatsoever in PvE and the game’s much too stationary bosses. Your movement rarely needs to take into account your ability to land shots, just do whatever it takes to dodge the enemy’s telegraphed cannons and stay close while spamming the shoot buttons.
The assault rifles and other long/mid range options still had a strong place in Old Gen because in order to track targets within your lockbox, you had to keep a certain distance that made their movement manageable, allowing them to be good ways to chip away at enemies with ease. In comparison, AC6 gives you no reason to ever be far from opponents. With the increased power of laser blades, the addition of assault boost kicks, and the bosses who constantly dash up to you for Souls-like melee attacks, there is nearly never a reason to play long/mid range. You need to stay close to even dodge most boss attacks which ask you to hover over them and/or dash past them. It’s telling that most FCS given to you are close-range focused and that Sniper Rifles didn’t even make it into this game.

I find these flaws to be the result of the sacrifices made by the game for the sake of ultra-intuitive controls, but when you take away the entire skill of aiming and the movement, positioning, and weapon balancing factors that come with it, issues like this are bound to bubble up. It's also because of this that none of the mech types really feel as different as they used to, with the controls homogenized the way they are, many of the drawbacks and strengths of different mech-types are not as apparent. Of course the flipside of this is you can now bring a tank leg into any kind of fight you want, whereas Oldgen AC tended to railroad you into making a fast AC if you wanted to deal with its endgame challenges. But unlike this game, Oldgen AC often still had a lot of bite and challenge left to it even when you develop an AC that has the right tools for the mission. That isn’t to say that you can’t cheese difficult fights and challenges with some broken weapons/setups, but you had to go out of your way to make them and most challenges feel beatable without a cheese build, you just need the skills to push yourself over the finish lines. The demands of the build were only one half of the puzzle, but playing well enough to beat challenges was even more emphasized, which I don’t find be the case in Armored Core 6 as the “right build” is both even easier to make and once created, utterly destroys any challenge and doesn’t let me have any fun with the boss. Perhaps this is great for the type of player who likes the power-fantasy of crushing infamous Souls bosses by changing their build, but I was never that kind of player and even if I was, the relative ease and simplicity at which you can create a build that dominates all this game’s content makes even that part of the game unsatisfying in concept.

It's hard to look at the game in a good light after three playthroughs, with the flaws in the game’s balancing and the limited depth of its systems becoming more apparent as I attempted to find ways to make the game challenging. This a game where you never need to worry about anything but dodging once you’re locked on and while yes, the ways in which you dodge in this game are definitely more fun than Souls i-framing, dashing over forward moving attacks that every boss spams is not enough to make me fall love in with a game, especially not with the vast majority of missions being some flavor of “boring” with how little they demand of any of the systems in place. At the very least I hope the way this game introduces mech-building can serve as a nice way to ease players into the older games.