Review - Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Introduction
When I was a kid too young to speak, read, write, or form any thoughts other than incoherent gibberish, my older brother had a PS3. I don't remember the exact specifics of where my family lived at the time, but I remember sitting next to him on the bed in front of the TV set as he played Armored Core 4. I remember the grassy landscapes, towering cities left to rot in the wake of a war long since passed, fortresses suspended high in the air, looming quiet yet in wait rather than in peace. But most of all, I remember the glinting metal comets that inhabited those spaces, the roar of their boosters, the rattle of gunfire, and the flash of plasma blades as my brother's AC clashed against his opponent's hull. Needless to say, I was mesmerized. Alas, I'd been too young to understand how to play the game myself, and though attempts were made, I couldn't yet pilot with the same finesse and skill that I'd seen in my brother, and that desire would lay dormant in me for the rest of my childhood.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, contrary to the prior paragraph, was a game that I wasn't really aware of during its initial release period. I had a couple friends that got into it and sung its praises to the highest of hills, but I never got into it myself until a year or so later, when I saw that it had gone on sale on Steam a few Christmases ago and I had credit on my account to spare.
I then spent the next year completely obsessed with it.
Plot Synopsis
Waking in the pilot seat as Augmented Human C4-621, we make planetfall to ISB2262 Rubicon 3 (often just referred to as Rubicon) at the behest of our operator and broker Handler Walter in search of the Coral, a strange substance I can only describe as "self-duplicating gasoline that makes technology better and also you can smoke it." Thus, Rubicon, as the sole source of this substance, serves as the site of conflict between four major parties all fighting over control of the planet, and thereby the Coral. This is exacerbated by the fact that, a half-century prior to the events of the game, Rubicon experienced a proverbial cigarette-in-a-gas-station type of calamity called the Fires of Ibis that lit the entire star system on fire using said Coral, wiping out all human inhabitants and civilization and leaving Rubicon a barren wasteland devoid of the one resource that everyone wanted until traces of it started reemerging around the time the game starts.
By the time C4-621 (later "Raven," a name we peel off a wrecked AC in the tutorial mission) crash lands on Rubicon, we find it under contention by the two rival corporations, Balam Industries and the Arquebus Corporation, both seeking the Coral for their own ends, as well as the Planetary Closure Administration, a public organization that controls and regulates access to Rubicon 3 in the wake of the Fires to prevent another such calamity from occurring, and the Rubicon Liberation Front, comprised of survivors of the Fires and their descendants who fight to free themselves and Rubicon from the oppression of the PCA and corporate control. We (the player/Raven & Handler Walter) operate as independent mercenaries, taking jobs from the corporations, the RLF, and other external parties to further our own search for the Coral, wherever that may lead.
Gameplay & Systems
At its core, Armored Core VI is a game about big robots beating the ever-living hell out of each other with great emphasis on customization, personalization, and overcoming challenges through arsenal preparation and pilot skill combined. The concept itself isn't new, FromSoftware has worked on a variety of mech/mecha games since the late 90s and early 2000s with the original run of Armored Core, its spinoffs, and other games like the Another Century's Episode series, Chromehounds, and Steel Battalion, but Armored Core VI stands as a unique experiment in fusing modern FromSoft action game philosophies with the foundational gameplay features of the Armored Core series.
The main singleplayer campaign of Armored Core VI is mission-based like its predecessors, mostly consisting of you in your AC wrecking house in set locations, fighting fodder enemies, other ACs, and bosses, while also keeping an eye out for secrets hidden throughout some of the levels that lead to optional fights and hidden loot. While initially I found myself having issues familiarizing myself with the control scheme and not crashing my dear, sweet LOADER 4 into every wall, mounted gun, wrecked building, and lockdown enforcement attack helicopter I could find, once I got a hang of the controls I found the game fairly comfortable to play, skating, floating, and boosting through sorties like some kind of tungsten and lead-based violence fairy. That isn't to say that the game isn't difficult by any means, like any FromSoft game it has its moments where you're forced to sit up in your chair and focus up or go back to the assembly to rethink your build, especially with consideration to certain boss fights found in later chapters, but I wouldn't necessarily say this is a bad thing. Buildcrafting, tinkering, optimizing your AC both to your preferred playstyle and the next job you're planning on taking are all core (ha) parts of Armored Core VI, to the point where I'd say that messing around in the Assembly is one of the most fun parts of the game, and unlocking new parts to buy and mess around with as you progress through the story feeds into that desire to experiment, improve, and understand both yourself and the tools you use to achieve victory. Even 80+ hours later, long after I'd unlocked, bought, and found every available AC part, I still find myself sitting in the Assembly screen having loaded the LOADER 4 preset once again to tinker with a new idea, new weapon loadout, new leg type, booster/generator combo, weight class. In a way, it hearkens back to the days I used to spend as a kid with a variety bin of Lego bricks, always disassembling and reassembling, finding new shapes to make and seeing what I could do with old ones before I recycled them.
Alongside the main campaign and unlocked gradually through story progression, Armored Core VI also features an Arena mode where you can duel a wide variety of NPC-controlled ACs in a controlled 1v1 for money, part unlocks, and OS upgrade chips (a separate currency used to unlock special features, like the ability to mount hand weapons to your back slots or assault boost kicking). Unfortunately, there isn't as much to speak on here other than the fact that the Arena lets you familiarize yourself with ACs that you normally wouldn't fight at the point of the story they're unlocked for when you do fight them, and I personally didn't find any of the Arena fights particularly difficult compared to their story mode counterparts, but they do provide interesting lore tidbits about the characters that pilot said ACs and the mode as a whole functions well enough as a sort of preamble to Armored Core VI's online PvP mode.
Said PvP mode allows you to participate in ranked duels against other players and their ACs for prestige and the opportunity to test your mettle against setups and play patterns that you wouldn't see in the normal game, as well as being able to fight alongside two other pilots in 3v3 team battles for a wholly unique competitive experience that pushes your skills and AC to their absolute limits in higher ranks. Granted, I wasn't around for the heyday of Armored Core VI PvP, nor was I particularly good at it in the period I played when the communities surrounding it were beginning to go into dormancy and the players were moving on to other things, but looking back on tournament footage and meta build analysis from creators like Striker Hutassa and Mobi Geeks Out revealed another layer of complexity that made me fall in love with the game even more. I keep finding myself revisiting Striker Hutassa's patch 1.07.2 Scuffed Cup tournament video every now and again just to witness the sheer variety of builds on display and experience the excitement and adrenaline of competition (even if it's by proxy), to the point where I'd actually joined his Discord server to participate in a few pickup matches with notable players I'd seen in tourneys he'd hosted like Comic_sans, Picklegoon, Negev, and IAmNotConnie, the last of which dumpstered me so thoroughly in a heavy tetrapod setup that moved so much faster and more aggressively than I thought it should that all I could say in call was "ma'am please get away from me!" (and I say that endearingly). It was fascinating in a way that I haven't experienced in any other game before, and made me wish that I was more competitive and gotten into Armored Core VI sooner to partake in the PvP experience at its peak.
Critiques
Despite all the love I have for the game, there are some things that I feel should be addressed. Online multiplayer netcode isn't the greatest, ask any experienced PvP player and they'd be able to speak on it further, but the gist is that hit registration in online PvP can be finnicky and there are certain popular weapon choices that take advantage of someone having a bad connection. As much as I praise the Assembly Screen Experience, I will admit that the stat descriptions are much more esoteric than they need to be for how simple they actually are, and it took me looking up a few videos online to actually get a grasp on how different parts and stats interact with each other so I could start making my own builds from scratch. I mentioned it briefly in the gameplay section, but for me at least the game wasn't especially difficult outside of a few notable outliers (still malding over Arquebus Balteus to this day beat Arquebus Balteus yesterday lol), which is something that was eventually solved by the Armored Core VI PC modding community (praise be Rubicon's Inferno, still haven't tried it yet but it's on the bucket list). Most of all though, something that I'm still a bit sad about to this day, is that even three years after release and a over a full decade between the release of the last Armored Core (Armored Core V and the Verdict Day standalone expansion) we haven't heard anything about any potential future content for Armored Core VI. While there have been a few content and balance patches to the game since release, from what I can tell FromSoftware has found that Armored Core VI is in a balanced enough state that no changes to the metagame have been necessary since the May 2025 balance & bugfix patch, and as far as many of us can tell, that's how it shall be for the foreseeable future. Many of us are still holding out hope for more ACVI, myself included, but only time will tell if we're to return to Rubicon once more.
Summary
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is a likely candidate for one of my favorite games of all time. Even if it may be relatively niche compared to the cultural behemoths that FromSoftware have been responsible for letting loose unto the world, it still holds a special place in the hearts of many, myself included. And with the resurgence of this genre of mecha-action games in the indie scene with projects like Code RAPID, Rig Riot, and Ironwing Valiant in development, I'm definitely excited to see how contemporary developers interpret and build off the foundation that FromSoft has laid with Armored Core VI.
Afterword
Hi again! This is actually my first attempt at writing an in-depth review like this (or as in-depth as I was able to get), and one that I might going to go back and do a few edits of once I've had time to let it sit. I started work on this project on the 1st of September, around a week after I started playing Armored Core VI again after a long hiatus, and the hyperfixation ended up being so severe that I felt the need to write this to help remedy it. Also, attaching a link to the tournament video uploaded by Striker Hutassa here if you'd like to see what really drove me to learn more about Armored Core VI's competitive community and more about the game as a whole.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a good day!