Well, I went ahead and got Armored Core VI. Even though I've got a purchased game that I haven't yet been able to play (BG3 - whose actual version is not yet available on the Mac) I found myself itching for the action.
ACVI is made by FromSoft, whose "Souls-like" game series has been a favorite of mine (ironically my two favorite of them I've played are not actually Dark Souls - I prefer Bloodborne and Elden Ring,) and so I came in expecting tight action and a serious challenge.
And... it's not quite what I expected. Not in a bad way, mind you.
ACVI feels in many ways like a throwback to the PS2 era and the kinds of games that were common when I was in high school (among them, some of the Armored Core series, though this is my first). While the level maps are giant, dystopian science-fiction ruins, the game is broken into discrete levels, and finishing a mission is usually pretty quick. One of the missions you get early on has only one simple objective, which is to take out an enemy AC, and while they give you a decent fight, the whole thing is over in a couple minutes.
Combat in ACVI is largely fairly easy - most foes go down in one or two hits from your various weapons, and as long as you keep on the move, you'll avoid most of their fire. However, this ease falls away entirely when you fight one of its bosses - and one of those bosses must be defeated before you can get past the intro level.
The first level of the game sees you landing on the planet Rubicon illegally, with minimal equipment and no ability to customize your mech (even when you go back and replay it). You're basically scrounging through the wreckage of other ACs to try to steal identification documents to allow you to sign into the mercenary coordinating system on the planet. The level is pretty simple - you jet around, learning how to control your mech, and fighting off foes who are not even close to matching your power. But then, after you find an ID that will sactually work for you, a gigantic attack helicopter shows up, and you have your first boss fight.
One of the things that makes the fight hard is that your most powerful weapon, a melee-only energy blade, requires you to, you know, get up close to the helicopter, which... as you can imagine, is usually flying around. It took me maybe four or five times to take down this boss, and I can see this serving as a bit of a wall that will prevent some players from progressing further in the game.
But that'd be a shame, because the subsequent missions are far, far easier. I don't think I died more than a couple times in any of them (as in, in total - most of them I beat on the first try without much fear of dying). And ACVI is also pretty generous with checkpoints - if you die, you reset to the last checkpoint, and it seems bosses will always have a checkpoint right before them. Once you get the ability to switch out your build, you can even swap builds if you die and come back to the checkpoint.
Now, getting parts for your AC is one of the big systems in the game, and the main way you can get them is by purchasing them in the Parts Shop. But here's the amazing thing: you can replay missions as many times as you want, and you get paid each time you complete them. So, it's not hard to find a quick and easy mission and just blaze through it a few times to earn the credits to buy that new set of missile launchers.
The statistics of each part vary greatly - there are a lot of ways in which they're balanced for different optimal scenarios. As such, getting new ones isn't about becoming strictly more powerful, but more about giving you new options for your situations. I haven't unlocked a ton of options yet, and still have many that I haven't bought yet, but for example, there's a pair of leg parts you can get that make you jump much higher and generally let you dodge out of the way of incoming fire much more easily that made a few missions way easier (like battling that enemy AC).
The world of AC is not a fun one - you're basically being used by a ruthless mercenary and at least in the early missions, you fight on behalf of a number of evil megacorporations, with your foes generally being other corps or the only people who seem like they might be the good guys, the Rubicon Liberation Front.
Only 7 or 8 missions in, I don't think I've got a great handle on the overall story, but I expect that our "mission control," "Handler Walter" (voiced by Travis Willingham in classic 'dark and gritty' mode) has some ulterior motives that he's in no hurry to share with us.
I think my agenda for this early stage of the game is to replay missions until I've been able to buy out the entire Part Shop (which might take a while) so that I can really experiment with my preferred weapons and AC builds.
A bit like the Souls games, the statistics of various weapons is only part of the story - the cadence of their attacks and, for your shoulder-mounted missile launchers, often the angle at which they strike, can make a theoretically more powerful weapon be trickier to use.
Trying to get a higher rank on the AC-duel mission, I put together a build that was all about staggering my foe and then having one weapon (the energy blade) that could make great use of the stagger bonus. (Some weapons will inflict a higher "impact" to stagger foes, and some weapons deal significantly more damage to staggered foes). But while heavy-hitting missiles and a bazooka in the right hand were pretty good for that fight (though given that the enemy AC has an energy blade, it might be best to build for long-distance) but I don't think it would be practical in missions with a lot of weaker enemies.
Anyway, I'll be curious to see how hard the game gets further in, and how good I get at it.
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