Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Mechs are cool. I think it’s just one of those innate facts that we all understand. Give a person a mech suit, let them fiddle around with the kinds of legs, arms, body, and weapons it has, and you’ve got a recipe for success. Armored Core 6 not only has plenty of weapons to choose from, but also different leg types that change the things you can do. Standard legs are jack-of-all-trades, reverse jointed legs are good for jumping, there are legs for hovering, and you can swap out legs for the lower half of a tank, which lets you carry more stuff.

As you’ve probably surmised, you can get really into building your mechs in Armored Core 6, and that’s something that I think will probably draw in a lot of people. Trying to balance your weight with the right thrusters and your weapons with the right energy output feels like a jigsaw puzzle, but one where you can upgrade your puzzle pieces as you go to make them all foil and shiny. This is also how you can find different builds and playstyles, so you could play as a lumbering hovering weapon system fully equipped with only grenade launchers and missile pods, or you can zip around with a highly mobile energy sword-wielding shotgun mech instead. They all feel viable in most of the levels, and that’s great. Plus, you can paint your mech and design emblems and stuff too, so if you want to just tinker with the fantasy of designing and building mechs, Armored Core 6 definitely has you covered.

While there is this deeply ingrained flexibility, I don’t think all of the weapons feel good; some definitely do, but not all of them. I can certainly see a use case for them, but while there’s certain weapons that will work in most scenarios, boss fights present these absurd walls to clamber