So, as a fan of FromSoft, I'm familiar with difficulty. I do think at some point I should return to the original Dark Souls, which I stalled out on after getting totally stuck on Ornstein & Smough. I'm still not sure I can ever handle the difficulty of the Ringed City DLC in DSIII (while I managed to get up to Midir and I think could have gone to Gael if I wanted to, I got burned out before I could) but I feel pretty comfortable with my skill level having beaten Elden Ring and Bloodborne, including the latter's DLC. (Elden Ring is probably the easiest of these, due in part to the fact that you can level up significantly by just doing mini-dungeons, and I think it's also balanced to give less diminishing returns on leveling up your HP stats).
Anyway, Armored Core is not a Souls-like game. It's not built like them at all. But I was still expecting some very difficult gameplay.
And... it's got some. But basically, it's only the bosses. The levels themselves are less about how hard they are to beat as much as they are about how efficiently you can charge through them. I think I've only died two or three times to non-boss enemies, and in one case I didn't die so much as get spotted in a mission where I was supposed to get to an enemy AC without being detected (or killing any enemies that saw me before they could report my presence).
Now, the bosses are tough. I'd say they're on-par with a lot of Soulsborne bosses, in that it's very unlikely you'll take them down on the first attempt (I did manage to take out the Juggernaut on try one, but it helped that I also had seen a video and knew that vertical-firing missiles were very useful against it).
But the enemies you face between bosses are generally not going to be a major threat - indeed, I really think the key to acing the game is not just being able to beat all the enemies you come across, but knowing that, for example, a single blast from your shotgun will take out that MT, or that a spread of missiles will take down that group of drones.
The bosses, then, are largely about figuring out what strategy to use. For example, in one mission you'll face off against Balteus, an autonomous drone with an array of missile launchers around it that can be configured in different ways, and I found that the key to the fight was getting up close and personal with it, closing distance so that its missiles would have a hard time locking onto me (in retrospect, using energy weapons to burn through its shields would have made it easier) while the next level has a boss called The Cleaner, who has extremely powerful melee attacks and thus encourages you to fight it from far away.
Now, a good build won't trivialize these fights (and many parts are gated behind progress in the story, so you'll only be able to use the arsenal the game allows you to amass up to that point) and execution is important, but because the game always puts a checkpoint right before boss fights, you'll be able to totally overhaul your AC with different parts if you die (though if you need to buy new parts, you'll have to quit out of the mission).
The game strongly incentivizes replaying missions, which I believe pay out just as much on a replay as they do your first go around. Generally, I don't sell parts and instead just amass more Credits to buy the parts I want (I did sell a few earlier today to make some big purchases). But I also think you can sell your parts back for precisely what you bought them for, so there's little regret you'll have in purchasing a new part.
I do think that some of the more esoteric parts - your Generator, your FCS, for example - aren't quite as "sexy" as new weapons, whose effects you feel very clearly as soon as you start playing.
I haven't beaten the game. But so far at least, I'd consider it challenging but not truly controller-smashingly hard. I haven't had any fights I've felt the need to quit out of the game and cool off from. There's no Nameless King so far. Though, there is a fight that is actually not unlike Ornstein & Smough - in one mission, you have to fight two powerful ACs from the PCA (basically the "government" faction on Rubicon, in contrast to the various corporations, criminal factions, and revolutionaries). One blasts you from afar while the other gets up close and tries to slash you with energy weapons. As is always the case with these fights, you need to keep them separated and wear one down before going to the next.
Aesthetically, the game is, of course, a kind of grimy used future with basically zero human element. The characters we interact with are just voices over comms, and the scale of the world is such that if there were people running around, you might not notice them (periodically you'll see stairways and realize that your mech is like four stories tall).
So, you know, I'm enjoying the game, but I'm not falling in love with it the way I have other FromSoft games. It is definitely letting me scratch that sci-fi action itch (given how excited I was to play an Armorer Artificer in a D&D campaign that ultimately wound up falling apart after three or four sessions, this kind of lets me play that subclass to its logical endpoint).
It is doing its job, though, of keeping me occupied while I wait for Larian Studios to release the Mac version of BG3.
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