Armored Core 6 brings mecha to the masses

polygon.com:

During my first few hours with Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon — the first Armored Core game I’ve ever played — I struggled (and mostly failed) to draw parallels between FromSoftware’s new game and the ones that made it a household name. The rebooted Armored Core is not a sprawling adventure game à la Elden Ring or Bloodborne, nor does my experience with those games make me a capable mech pilot.

Instead, Armored Core 6 is a reconsideration of a classic game series infused with a decade of studio growth, expertise in combat and level design, and the heightened expectations of FromSoftware fans. Armored Core 6 is a faster, more refined Armored Core experience that streamlines the mecha franchise in clever ways.

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Fires of Rubicon sends your character, a faceless, voiceless mercenary named C4-621, to the distant planet of Rubicon-3. This alien world is home to a substance known as Coral — Rubicon’s equivalent of Dune’s Melange or Avatar’s Unobtainium — which is so precious that extraterrestrial corporations fight endless wars to control it. As 621, your role in this conflict is fluid; your handler, a man named Walter, takes jobs from the competing factions of Rubicon and sends you into the field to do whatever dirty work pays the bills.

You transform your identity, such as it is, by stealing the name of another