Armored Core 6 Is FromSoftware At Its Most Forgiving

You won't have to Prepare to Die quite as often, this time.

FromSoftware games are notoriously difficult. Dark Souls’ complete package was even marketed as the “Prepare to Die Edition”, a fitting tagline given how brutal the game came to be. But it goes beyond tough fights and deadly locations, with mechanics designed around forcing you to learn the game through relentless trial and error.

When you die, all enemies respawn, you lose all of your hard-earned souls, and you’re forced back into an offline world, tasked with scrounging around for items to restore your humanity and summon help. Which, if you do, might also invite invaders. It’s a formula that From has stuck with for over a decade now, but Armored Core 6 bucks that trend and, with it, much of its unforgiving difficulty.

RELATED: Armored Core 6: Fires Of Rubicon Review - Mech Love, Not War

Like other games in the series, Armored Core 6 is all about building mechs. The rapid-fire missions are often a means to earn money and unlock new parts so that you can spend even more time in the garage fiddling with customisation.

However, Fires of Rubicon also pulls from Soulsborne games to bolster its combat. You’re often dashing through the air as your rocket propellers spit fire, dodging homing missiles as you frantically flip through your arsenal, sending back explosive rounds and a parade of bullets while more enemies slide into view. Lent from Sekiro, you’re also constantly aware of your enemy’s stamina, timing each weapon’s attack to crumble their fortitude as quickly as possible, leaving them open to a devastating blow.

Armored Core 6’s combat is tough. Foot soldiers are far easier than those in the Souls series, but when face-to-face with bosses, you’ll find yourself cursing through gritted teeth as you hit the restart button. Just as you would against Lady Maria or the Elden Beast. The difference is in how Armored Core 6 approaches checkpoints and roadblocks.

There’s a moment towards the end in which you come face to face with a Malenia-level boss, but it’s not optional. In Elden Ring, I spent hours dying over and over again to learn her patterns so that I could dodge every attack and avoid being killed in a single blow, mastering her moveset as best as I could. The roadblock was less about my build and more about my capabilities, demanding patience to triumph. While Armored Core is about the skill of its pilots as much as Souls is about the skill of its knights, there’s far more wiggle room when facing insurmountable odds.

I overcame this battle by returning to the garage and tweaking my mech. I started with a minigun, shotgun, and two sets of missile launchers on my back, but this boss was a fast, flittering fly gliding across the sky as though it were weightless. Brute force weaponry wasn’t cutting it. Luckily, you can return to the garage in the death menu, so you don’t have to restart the entire mission to alter your strategy. In this case, that meant I didn’t have to fight the duo of minibosses at the start, which were pretty tough in their own right.

From the assembly, I grabbed my plasma rifle, a long-range shotgun, laser turrets, and a shield, helping me to deal more precise blows while keeping my distance to avoid the flurry of scattered attacks that were often hard to dodge. And if my skills at maneuvering faltered, I at least had a shield to protect me.

This strategy worked far better, and in two tries, I finally overcame a boss I had been struggling with for nearly an hour. It wasn’t exclusively my capabilities holding me back, but my approach, and in emphasising the importance of toying with your mech and build at each checkpoint, Fires of Rubicon makes these arduous battles far more forgiving and less tedious.

Checkpoints themselves are, by nature, more merciful. Despite missions being brief, usually lasting five to 15 minutes, you’ll be met with plenty of autosave points. Death brings you back to these automatically with the option to retool your mech, and you do not lose any money. Often, these points are right before bosses too, so you don’t have to run a gauntlet of enemies every time you die just to reach the same fog wall over and over.

Speaking of money, you get a lot without even trying. I had purchased most of the equipment on offer and had millions of credits spare by the time NG+ rolled around, so experimenting with different weapons and mech parts wasn’t just easy, but incentivised. At no point did I have to grind, a refreshing change of pace when the skill ceiling in Souls games tends to fizzle out as you realise you’re simply under levelled.

Armored Core 6 is a mech shooter, not a Souls-like, but FromSoft has spent a decade gaining a reputation for difficulty both fair and unfair. I went into Fires of Rubicon expecting no different, but between it and Elden Ring, there’s clearly room for a maturer FromSoftware that weaves challenge with more lenient systems to make for more intuitive games, ones that don’t require an iron will to stick with. Hopefully, it marks a shift in approach, one that will bleed into its inevitable Souls-like future.

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James is a zoomer from Newcastle who didn't learn what a GameCube was until they were 18. They have bylines at IGN, VG247, and NME, and you can contact them at [email protected]. They/Them.