Armored Core 6 was 10/10 in my first playthrough, but the further playthroughs showed me that there are undeniable flaws that can’t be ignored, and it soured my enjoyment a bit. Here’s a review that explains my thought process.

Before riding the AC6 hype train, I beat AC3 on my old PS2 for the study purpose. It was a decent game, and I could understand why there are many people looking forward to the revitalisation of the AC series. The gloomy but kinda wacky world building, the alien feeling of movement control, the holistic gear combination system, and the planning procedure to beat the hard missions.. all these elements are conjoined like clockwork and formed a unique mech mercenary simulator. I could see the value of that, and I even poured some love to build the best hover tank mech, but to be honest, I didn’t fully love the game.

My PS2 is a dying old machine so there were a lot of performance-related frustrations here and there, but even without the technical issues there’s a thing I didn’t like about the structure itself.

One thing I really liked about the game is that a lot of tools require some risk factors. Jumping is cool, but it drains your energy. Every bullet fired will be counted and written on the receipt. Melee swing is powerful, but you can’t easily cancel out the animation. There are several options available from the get go, but there’s an underlying stake on your basic maneuver, and the combat situations can be more hectic and dynamic when you are fighting other AC enemies and some mobile enemy types, since you have to juggle both problems - the enemies threatening you and the player control itself.

However probably 50% of the missions were filled with boring fodder enemies that die in one hit, and some weak platforming sections. These obstacles are as basic as this “monkey see monkey do”, and I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I’m doing the tutorial mission again and again, but with different mech in control. The worst case however, would be when they introduce that “seemingly piss-easy mission” at the start, drag the game to snail pace, and then introduce the bullshit hard DPS monster AC as a mission final boss. Yes, I’m talking about the Destroy Kisaragi Forces mission. It was more than just frustrating to beat the mission, because I had to waste 5 minutes with nothing-burger obstacles just to get a single chance to beat the machine gun spamming monstrosity. Even beating that boss required some pure luck because 9 out of 10 times, my ally mech couldn’t bait the attention and the boss just spammed the machine gun at me with the extreme tracking ability and shredded me to pieces. That mission scarred my sanity to the point that I had to halt the AC3 playthrough for several months.

So, yeah. To put it shortly, what I could say about the AC series before playing AC6 was, “I can see the potential, and I hope the new one has better paced missions and encounters.”

Then AC6 was released, and I played it like there’s no tomorrow. After seeing the first credit sequence, I concluded that it is a tremendous masterpiece, the return of the king, “FROMSOFT never misses”, yada yada... You know what I mean. Everything I liked about the AC3 was conveyed with some modern touches. The movement felt slick with the modern control setting (thank god for the right stick camera control), extra stake on your positioning is still a thing thanks to the lack of i-frames, shoulder weapons and main hand weapons are much easier to juggle, and the universal assault booster is a great inclusion as a both positioning and offense tool. Even though the nuanced mech turning mechanic of old AC games got removed in the procedure, overall, it was a cool player foundation.

I also liked the inclusion of mid-level checkpoints. Of course it is an unthinkable idea when you consider about the previous entries’ core gameplay value -the pre-mission strategy aspect-, but at the very least there won’t be cases like “Destroy Kisaragi Forces”, and the mission structure could be built to throw more heavy punches at you.

I was very delighted when I met the giant tetrapod enemy for the first time, because that common enemy actually showed the “dangerous patterns to care about” unlike any other previous non-AC enemy jobbers. In fact, most of the common enemies are in the straight-up-upgraded territory when you compare them to the older games. Things like invisible sniper and the Karla’s bionicle-looking creatures added more threats to the early game. There were cool multi enemy fight sequences too, like fighting several invisible mechs in the coral plant.

Just like the previous games, AC fights are the moments where you have to focus on your actions, but the non-conventional-AC bosses are the absolute highlights of the game. The early mission chopper boss had more things going on when compared to something like that weird submarine boss you find at the late game part of AC3. And the series of bosses after that chopper never disappointed me. Cataphract is probably my favorite when it comes to the casual rematch, mainly because of the short mission structure and the rodeo-like boss fight flow I love, but there’s something special about the three giant walls of AC6 -Balteus, Sea Spider, and Ibis-.

In a way, they are designed like any other modern FROM action game bosses (especially Elden Ring bosses) which don't have a lot of safe patterns to counter. Each patterns get chained indefinitely and relentlessly, and you have to weave the counter measure when they show some windows in the attack animation. You won’t likely find them in the neutral state that often.

While the boss philosophy is similar, I liked only a handful of “hard Elden Ring bosses”, and absolutely adored every “hard boss” in AC6. Mainly because the player control is absolutely better in AC6, -like, no doubt about that- but there’s also a satisfying feeling about constantly changing and weaving your attack methods depending on the enemy pattern, enemy’s state and the position of your character. Are they too far away? Use the tracking missile to give some small damage or to bait the action. Are they in the mid-range? Use the main damage dealer (like bazuka or rifle). And if you are floating high enough, you may get a higher chance to hit it too. If you found the way to get near the boss? Time to go melee and beat the shit out of it! And these internal choices are not flowcharty at all, as some weapons have multi purposes (for example, the lancer-drill thing is really good at tracking the enemy and narrowing the space in the extreme speed, so it is good for zooming if you are low on boost energy), and the ever-changing circumstances require you to do different things.

That’s why I enjoyed the game in the game design manner, but of course there are other reasons to like it too. Even though the game is firmly set itself as a mech dystopia game, somehow FROM’s creative fantasy design found its way to shine brightly with the striking visual of crimson coral mist and the mechanical monstrosities like Ice Worm and Strider. The sound work full of heavy explosives, banging metal, crunching plates, and gearing machines can be described as top notch, even though it muffled some music in the background. And while many people criticized the game for having a dried up narrative tone and rather weak conclusion, I have to give a credit to the devs, that somehow, they made likable characters only with the audio transmission and without any portraits or animations depicting the characters. The voice actors (for the main characters) actually nailed their job wonderfully.

So why did it sour my enjoyment in the end? Well, if you think the game’s entire value is lying on the first playthrough, and you can rate the game conclusively by just watching the initial ending of it, I won’t stop you. (After all, that’s how I usually rate the games that I didn’t love with the initial approach). But I loved my first playthrough here in AC6, and I thought there’s obviously more things to dig in, as the game is built around in-depth combat mechanics, mech customization, and some branching missions.

So I dug more and I found the progression of the NG+ to be strange. There were some neat branching outcomes that are “narratively” interesting, but other than that, every vanilla mission worked as it was, without any enemy placement adjustments or difficulty tuning works. Imagine you are playing Doom Eternal with all the unlocked fully-leveled up weapons but all the enemies are the doom soldiers. That’s what it felt like going through the old missions again.

Even the new missions or the other branched missions were boring to get through. Yes, there were interesting new situations that weren’t presented in the first playthrough, but every enemy (that I complimented before) dies in one combo of assault boost-melee attack, and at that point, there were no new threats that would surprise me, because 99% of them were already utilized in the first playthrough anyway. The new test subject ACs were no different as they cannot be really distinguished from the normal ACs you fought in the normal arenas.

At the end of NG++, there were only a handful of missions that satisfied me with the fully-geared up mech. The final mission that featured Baltius 2, the Defend the Strider mission that occurred in the early part of NG++, and the true final boss mission. But even then, the feeling of clearing them was nowhere close to beating Ibis for the first time, which was a huge let down.

In a way, this can work as a power fantasy, as you can use all the upgraded mech parts and mow down all the challenges you struggled before, but for that purpose, I can replay the missions in the replay tab, not doing the same missions all over again. You can say this is a chance to use different builds or intentionally undertuned mechs, but that’s unreasonable to me as I built up my mech that suits to my fun zone, and with some experiments, I found the balancing to be extremely broken, so I decided to stay where I am -a moderately mobile tank build that has some generalist tool-.

The thing is, when I beat the game for the first time, my mech wasn’t in the most optimized state. I mained the wheelchair tank which is pretty mobile in the tank leg standard, but still clumsy about aerial mobility. I stuck to the wheelchair because it just looked aesthetically pleasing. My stubbornness about the wheelchair was the reason why my builds were not always fully optimized, which made the game more challenging in some way. Like, platforming or moving to higher ground with the wheelchair is kinda hard. Also assault-boosting towards a boss required more thoughtful and deliberate approach as you can’t easily avoid the dangers from the midrange zone with this tank leg. I kinda knew the importance of staggering enemies, but I’ve never thought about using the songbirds and shotgun, so I relied on some bazuka weapon with kinda okay-ish tracking ability, and some missile launchers on shoulders. It is not too awful, but from the late-game min-maxer’s standpoint, it is kinda mid build.

After the initial playthrough, I tried the infamous Zimmermann & Songbird combination with high mobility chicken legs. Something was definitely off, and that was the point I felt like “yeah I’ll just stay in my place because this is too busted”. This is the criticism that was done a million times by the experienced AC players by now, but the stagger system needs more than just a single balance patch. I would say the item unlock system might need some rework too. While some people consider that mowing down the hardship with busted builds can be considered as a “player expression”, I personally think it is way too easy to approach as it stands now. I just didn’t use that because I just simply assumed those weapons aren’t my vibes, but still, those OP weapons’ unlock timing is pretty questionable. Remember that you have to show some little bit of effort and study to make a busted build in the Dark Souls series.

So there you have the reasons why I thought this game doesn’t deserve the glowing five star love call. I wouldn’t say the NG++ experience was necessarily the worst time in my life, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that the game showed more weakness by telling me that there are more things to discover. But unlike the bittersweet feeling -that FROM can not truly escape from its own mannerisms- I had after beating Elden Ring, I’m absolutely hopeful about the expansion of Armored Core 6 after this. After all, the game is like an old mech that has been abandoned for 10 years and just booted again. Malfunction is damned sure to happen, but the important thing is… it worked for me as the initial run. And this dust-covered mech finally got the limelight again, so there are more chances to be upgraded in the future.

[Here are some other petty complaints I want to make but I couldn’t fit them in the review so I list them here]

- I still don’t know why they decided not to rank the NG+ playthrough. If there were some score hunting elements while going through the previous missions, at least they would be more enjoyable.

- The only hover tank in this game is lukewarm at best. This is an utter disrespect against the hover leg users in the previous games.

- Speaking of special legs, including the leg parts, there aren’t many interesting body parts when you compare them to AC3. Of course the build variety would suffer with AC6’s semi-stream-lined approach, but I didn’t expect it to have this low amount of variety.

- I know the scoring hunting requires several retries, but I wish the S rank threshold was more transparent than the current form. I can’t expect what method the game wants from me to achieve the S rank in the mission. Do I have to minmax the shit out and burst everything down at the speed of light? Or do I have to wear the basic gears to lower the ammo cost? Some hints can be cool, I think.

- The current way the OST chip was implemented is not good at adjusting the small stats when you are in the first run. The devs implemented the hard reset function anyway, so why not just allow me to allocate the chip wherever I want?

- Quick match implementation, please.