The combat and enemies and openworld are on the basic side, but Travis himself, and the game's immense charm and style, addicting gameplay loop, witty writing, damn solid music and unique and fun boss fights (except Speed Buster lmao) outweigh the previously mentioned negatives by tenfold.

So in short; It's Suda51, what can I say? That guy's an enigma on the level of Hideo Kojima or Yoko Taro, and all of his unique ideologies and worldviews certainly carry over here, and that makes the game and the experience of playing it unlike any other.

honestly really wanted to like this game, but after about 2 hours or so of playing, i can definitively say this is fromsofts worst game.

the game is really lacking in areas dark souls excels at. there is no interconnected world, only scattered missions that all seem to take place in similar looking snowy destroyed cities.

the enemy design is practically non-existent, they just kind of stand there waiting for you to one shot you. an ambush never feels impactful because you can just stand at super far range and deal with every enemy efficiently, unlike dark souls which has extremely intense gank fights due to you having to engage them in melee combat, where you're constantly at risk and have to learn how to properly dodge every attack.

every boss is just a big ship that spams pretty much undodgeable attacks at you and you just facetank all the damage and wait for your sword to recharge (which takes like 10 years btw). from a company that has produced such excellent bosses as ornstein+smough and slave knight gael, i really would've expected better from them.

the controls feel fine until you actually have to use your weapons, all of which having extremely long cooldowns. the sword (the only fun weapon in the game imo) takes an especially long time to charge, meaning youre constantly waiting to have fun again. youll notice good games from this studio like dark souls never had such problems, because they realized waiting 80 years for a weapon to recharge isnt fun at all.

the game constantly interupts you with walls of dialogue that is not well written in the slightest before every single mission. i thought we should've learned from dark souls that the best way to tell a story (of which dark souls has a far more interesting one) is through subtle hints in the world and in item descriptions or optional dialogue with characters.

dark souls had an incredibly praised checkpoint system which required you to complete a large chunk of a level before you got a checkpoint. armored core 6, reduces these chunks, removing all sense of tension from the game. at this point, might as well just make me immortal since death doesnt even matter at all.

the last thing i want to really touch on in this review is the healing system. for some bizarre reason, fromsoft has forgotten one of their most innovative design decisions, which was the estus flask systems from dark souls. part of what made it so great was the fact that it forced you to be stuck in place for a few seconds before you were allowed to move again, making it something you had to sacrifice your attack phase to use. unfortunately, armored core 6 foolishly does not make use of this system, allowing you to instantly heal, which at that point, you might as well just extend the healthbar because there is no point to healing.

overall, a massive disappointment from a studio i love. definitely making me doubt whether or not the upcoming elden ring dlc will be good considering the design decisions they were willing to make here.

everything about this game has so much personality and charm, it improves on basically everything from the original game. theres only like 1 bad level in this entire game, the rest of it is a blast.

even the missions with goals that arent just making something as big as possible within a time limit, which i actively disliked in the original, are super fun in this game.

the king has extra personality in this game, basically every scene involving him was super funny even if it was the same joke literally every time someone asks for help.

the game is also set at the perfect length, being almost twice as long as damacy, which was my biggest issue with damacy, it felt like it ended just as i was beginning to get really into it.

namco pls reroll this game thank you very much

edit: thank you very much namco