When From Software announced Armored Core 6, I got interested in exploring the older games in the series in order to find out what kind of bedrock of design that the developer was working with for their next big title.
To expand on that…
I have somewhat complicated feelings on FromSoft, as their games are what made me understand a new to enjoy the medium and started my appreciation for deep, challenging gameplay, and I enjoyed them greatly when I first played them. Unfortunately, I ended up growing a bit frustrated with how their design has settled into a kind of mediocrity where they make their games simpler in terms of the skills they demand out of you, while trying to maintain the difficulty by adjusting the games in IMO uninteresting ways. The Souls games had always had a bit of an issue with how lenient the dodge roll timing is, but their earlier games had expensive stamina costs on them to balance this out, however, as they wanted to make the games more action focused, this started to get in the way. Instead of adjusting it so rolls have less i-frames in order to allow them to design enemies with more flexible attack patterns that emphasize positioning just as much as they could emphasize timing, they instead doubled down.
Ever since Bloodborne, they’ve been narrowing down their games into timing and reaction challenges as much as they can, with Dark Souls 3 giving you lots of stamina and easy fast roll, and designing bosses to have long strings of attacks to test your ability to roll through all of them as the new main challenge of the game.
Elden Ring headed further in this direction, with longer, weirder strings that meant to throw off the timing of even the most veteran players. their prior game, Sekiro, felt like a mission statement setting in stone their modern design: Extremely simple, static solutions to simple problems. Parry regular Attacks, Mikiri Counter the Thrusts, Jump the Sweeps, Dodge Grabs, and mash your attacks in-between. While its a little uncharitable, I would almost call it a game of Simon Says, at least that’s how I felt about it given how reliant the game was on standing in front of the enemy and simply pressing the right button that completely counters that the enemy does. I wasn’t very challenged and I didn’t think the core design they had going on would even be fun if it was hard. Everything was boiled down into timing and reaction while positioning, difficult decisions, and compelling risk-reward seemed to have faded away from their design.
My opinions on them aside though, From Software are a massive developer with critical acclaim, and anything they release is going to get a ton of eyes on it….which gets us to Armored Core. A very niche mecha-simulation action series that was From Software’s flagship before they found success with the Souls games. At a glance, everything about Armored Core is very unlike modern FromSoft and how they like to design their games, and I was very interested in seeing if AC6 would be the game to get them to finally start thinking of new ways to challenge players that go beyond pressing a dodge roll at the right time. I wanted to see what they are working with.
Sorry for the long pre-face, let me actually talk about Armored Core now….
I played Armored Core 1, Masters Of Arena, Armored Core 3, Silent Line, and Last Raven. As well as like 5 hours of Armored Core 4.
All the games before Armored Core 4 are more are less the same game in general terms, their strengths and weaknesses are largely the same and the mechanics added are very incremental, so I will be speaking about all of the Pre-4 games right now.
Armored Core’s main virtue is its control mechanics, so before I talk about how I feel about it, allow me to briefly explain Armored Core’s controls in case you haven’t played the games.
Your mechs control more like vehicles than action characters (shocking), and operate on a Tank-Controls basis, where your ability to turn has a limited speed tied to your mech’s stats, and you are unable to aim independently of where your mech is facing, meaning you cannot flick your camera to view the area around you or shoot enemies who are to your sides or behind you.
The way in which you aim and target enemies is by placing them inside a rectangular outline in the center of your screen called the Lock Box. Once an enemy is placed inside your lock-box, your mech will lock-on to the target and all projectiles you shoot will attempt to curve towards the target as long as they were within the lock-box. The dimensions of the rectangular outline and the lock-on range is determined by a combination of your weapon and FCS (Firing Control System) mech part.
In terms of movement, the game has a boost mechanic that is governed by an energy bar. Boosting greatly increases your speed and allows you to fly, but consumes energy. Empty your bar and you will be stuck unable to use anything that consumes energy until the bar fully refills. Boosting is not the only thing that consumes energy, as there are laser blades and energy weapons that use it as well.
One of the core movement techniques in Armored Core is Boost Hopping/Bunny Hopping, which involves jumping and lightly boosting to maintain speed with a reduced energy cost compared to just holding the Boost button. Bunny Hopping also allows you to more easily change directions as its quicker to do in mid-air rather than on the ground.
The real difficulty of this technique is using light boosts in mid-air to reduce your falling height, as if you fall too abruptly, your mech will come to standstill to recover from the fall, a period of recovery that can prove fatal in fights. So the heart of it is knowing how little you need to boost in order to lighten your fall and allow you to continue the bunny hop chain. Different boosters that you equip will have different strengths and require a different rhythm to correctly bunny hop, which can also change depending on your mech’s weight.
These control mechanics, the limitations they place on you, and your ability to adjust the nuances of how you use them through the way you build your mech changing the minute details of how you approach movement and tactics is extremely compelling. Its interesting to have a game where your ability to move is so free and fast, yet your ability to aim and track targets is very limited due to the generally slow turn speeds of the mechs. This leads to gameplay that emphasizes movement and positioning, since you are unable to flick your aim to targets, the next best thing to track moving targets is to move with them and force them into your view.
Positioning becomes important because the concept of distance and how it relates to your ability to aim is vital in this game. Close up, a fast mech is able to spin circles around you and you can’t hit them since you simply can’t turn around fast enough, however, at a farther distance the target can’t move out of your lock-box as easily and thus allows you to keep track of their movement despite your limited turning speed. Of course, your weapon’s optimal range can change how you play around this, combine that with the specific turning and movement speed of your mech and things can get really complicated really fast. A shotgun player will have to dance out of the range where tracking the enemy is easiest, to close in distances to get their shot, before backing away to be able to track the enemy again. On the other hand, a player with a sniper or rifle will be constantly trying to backpedal and keep the their far distance no matter the cost in order to make its easier for them to aim and to take advantage of their far range.
Enemies are subject to the same rules, so if an enemy is too accurate for you to dodge and is able to track your movements, getting closer and boosting over and around them will make them lose track of you and force them to try to turn around to hit you, this period of slow turn around giving you a big opportunity to hit them without getting hit.
These aspects of Armored Core come most strongly in 1v1 fights against other mechs, which are consistently the most enjoyable and intense part of these games in my opinion, and I think I’m not alone on that considering the Arena feature (a gauntlet of mechs that you 1v1 in order to climb through the arena ranks) is so beloved and has stayed in most of the games since its introduction in Project Phantasma. It should also come as no surprise that these games now have an active multiplayer scene after the recent improvements to PS2 emulation.
The mech-building itself is also very compelling in terms of all the stats you have to balance. Defense, Weight, the Energy Consumption that each individual part adds can change what your mech is capable of very drastically, and trying to make a mech that looks cool to you will often end up with you having to do some problem solving with your parts in order to get them to be effective mechs. Some of the later games like Last Raven go into simulation territory with the emphasis on a heat mechanic, where your boost generates heat when used, and you need to use a Radiator (cooler) to offset the heat production of your Boosters and other environmental factors in order to prevent overheating.
While getting to know all the stats is not easy and getting a grip on the controls is not everyone, but its genuine fun once you get into the groove and its a game that emphasizes everything that modern From Software doesn’t. The game has no i-frames, dodging attacks is based on your ability to throw off the tracking of missiles and bullets through positioning yourself at their weak ranges and switching directions properly to offset the tracking. Missiles for exmaple, always track you better the farther you are, so throwing off their tracking and then getting closer to the source of the missile is key to dodging them. Energy Management is also a crucial aspect of gameplay, especially if you use Energy Weapons which make it so your resource for movement is also consumed by your attacks in a way that is reminiscent of the stamina system in Souls games and how it shares the same pool of resources for attacks and dodges.
Point is..there is a LOT going on, and its sick. FromSoft struck gold with the core design of these games and it makes sense why they stuck so closely the PS1 games for a decade.
If From manages to capture that in Armored Core 6, I would probably really like that game because I think modern From Software would be able to do everything else about these games much better now….
Oh right…I haven’t mentioned it yet, but outside the core mechanics and excellent 1v1 fights, there is a lot wrong with Armored Core.
The Achilles Heel of this series, in my view, is the abysmal standards for mission design. The basis of how missions encourage good play is not bad, since they deduct costs for repairing your mech and for the ammo you use, encouraging you to minimize the damage you receive and to use more ammo-efficient and difficult methods for completing missions. However, the actual contents of the missions tend to be garbage.
Many missions will throw you into these narrow corridors where there is no room for movement, counterplay, or anything fun really. Enemies line up in the corridors and you are meant to dump damage into them and move forward for the most part. One can say that maybe these missions exist to give a purpose for slower, tankier mechs but I think they simply take up too much of the playtime and just don’t provide anything interesting. Trudging through copy pasted hallways and mowing down turrets on your way and then backtracking through them again to unlock some door is never fun or tense, and it takes up far too much of the game compared to the actually fun missions.
These missions impact more than just the gameplay to me, they also tend to put a bit of a dent in the fantasy of control a giant mech. While the outdoor environments can convincingly communicate a sense of scale, the in-door environments make absolutely no sense if you were consider that they were built by humans, to be traversed by humans. Why is this Research Lab a bunch of long, nondescript corridors with massive doors? Why are the layouts so useless and non-sensical with random turns and twists and long stretches of nothing? I am sure some of it is just technological and budget limitations but it just seemed weird that they would ever make levels like this in the first place when the outdoor levels look and play to the strength of the premise so much better.
Now, there are some good missions that make progression bearable. Ones with bigger, open areas, actually intensive combat scenarios, and premises that emphasize movement are always fun. One example I was fond of was a mission took place on an Oil Tanker where the objective was stopping enemies from stealing supplies that were on the water. I was playing a bipedal mech that can’t swim, so I had to very carefully manage my energy to be able to move between the platforms and fly into the water to shoot the enemies while also ensuring I had enough energy to fly back to a platform. It was stressful and intense and emphasized my ability to fly, aim, and manage my energy at the same time.
Stuff like this does happen, There are usually about 5-6 good missions per game that actually give you fun challenges, but that’s a pretty bad ratio compared to boring filler missions that don’t seem to do anything but give you easy enemies to shoot at and long corridors to traverse. This is pretty consistent throughout all the games, and it only gets better in Last Raven as far as I played, by virtue of its difficulty, it tends to include much more stressful scenarios and turns a lot of its missions into a gauntlet of 1v1 mech fights.
Armored Core 2 also opens up with a pretty interesting set of missions that demand your change your mech for all of them to succeed, but that also gives way to much more boring missions later.
I also think most of the games have slight balancing issues, with either very overpowered or very underpowered weapons. In Armored Core 3/SL’s hard mode it felt very difficult not to use a machinegun in the game’s arena mode, everything else did not seem to do nearly as well, and I couldn’t find a single video of someone not using MGs in the arena….it was pretty sad. Granted, there was probably slight skill issue and I think I could probably pull off a shotgun build in that game now.
On that note, inability to use back weapons without crouching down with a bipedal mech also feels very restrictive given the variety of weapons available as back weapons and the way they can round out your kit. I get that they needed to give Quad-Legs an appealing reason to be used, but in a game where you want to make your mech look cool it can be a bit of a turn off that half the weapon roster is locked out if you use the most aesthetically popular leg type.
Funny enough, many of the flagship mechs in the series that are featured on promotional art and cutscenes are bipedal mechs with back weapons that tend to severely overweight and unable to use their weapons if actually recreated in-game. You can get around this with an optional part called Human Plus or OP-INTENSIFY depending on the game, which is rewarded either as an NG+ reward or given to you for failing too many missions as a form of Easy Mode. I would have preferred if they found a way to give Bipedal Mechs more flexible weapon options without making it overpowered, personally.
The earlier games in the series are also quite annoying when it comes to restarts and learning missions. Most of the games make you progress even if you fail a mission, incurring a cash loss for repairing the mech without the payout for completing the mission, rather than giving you the option to restart the mission.
Due to the nature of the game, you will often be going into missions not fully sure what to expect. You have to consider many parameters such as how much ammo will you need? What ranges will the enemies be in? How much space do you have to move? Do I need heat resistance, ECM resistance, or the ability to swim or fly long distances? and so on…
This means a lot of trial-and-error is involved in the process of playing a mission to figure out what you really need to succeed, and then going back, rebuilding your mech, and trying again. Without using save-states this is something that is only really accommodated in Last Raven (and probably Nexus, but I didn’t play that). The other games don’t have an easy restart button or restart on death, and instead will force you to go back to the main menu to load your save to try again and its a pretty slow process given all the menus you have to click through, between the cumbersome shop and assembly menus, and then needing to click through the mission briefings once you’re done with that. The mission briefings try to describe the mission a little bit, but sometimes there are twists or its not enough info to really predict what kind of mech you need. I don’t think this level of trial-and-error is an avoidable issue given the game’s design, but its something that should be facilitated to be made as painless as possible.
Speaking of the Shop and Assembly menus, this game has a pretty weird thing going on with its economy. Due to how experimentation focused the game is, the devs made the sensible decision of making it so selling your parts costs the same as buying them, meaning there is no long-term cost to buying parts as you can re-sell it for the same price in case you don’t like it. While this is very nice, it calls into question of why even have a shop system where you need to buy and sell parts in the first place?
It leads to a lot of trudging through menus to replace your mech’s parts. You know you have all the money you need to get what you want, but you need to sell everything, then buy the parts you want, then if you happen to not like it, you have to sell shit again, buy again, then assemble the mech again and the menus make it an inconvenient process. With the way the economy works it I thought it would be better to remove that system entirely and simply change to a “capacity” system where you have a money cap, and you can put on any parts as long as the total cost of your mech does not exceed your money cap.
…Or at least, that’s what I thought when I was playing. Thinking about it now, the way they did it makes sense considering the way in which money is deducted from you after missions and the fact that you get into the negatives and be in debt due to failures, and can try to get out of that by selling whatever parts you dont need or find through missions. More expensive mechs also cost more to repair, which adds another element to that. So….I guess my criticism of that aspect is invalid 😛
That being said, I find all the games to be very lenient with money and I never found money management to actually be a concern in any game besides the opening hours of Last Raven. The arena usually lets you get massive amounts of money so that you don’t care even if you never break even on missions costs.
Despite the flaws, I have an overall positive impression of pre-4th Gen Armored Core. Its a very unique experience that provided a kind of fun that I haven’t found in any other game, and I’m glad I tried it.
Now, about Armored Core 4…
Being the first game in the series directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, I am afraid this game will be the one that has the most influence on Armored Core 6 because I did not like it at all.
My main issue is with the new core mechanics. With the removal of the lockbox system, the addition of a universal quick turn, and boosting now costing very little energy your mechs have insanely mobile super robots with comparatively little limitations. Most of the design has been shifted into a new maneuver called Quick Boost which is essentially a dash with a burst of speed faster than regular boosting. While there are some cool movement techniques with this, the game’s overall design turned into a power fantasy involving fast mechs rather than the balanced and tense nature of older Armored Core.
Couple this with the missions all being insanely short and easy, the new shop screen somehow being a massive downgrade from Last Raven in terms of usability, and the visuals just being extremely ugly in my opinion resulted in this game giving me a terrible impression of 4th Gen.
However, what really depressed me is when I discovered how Quick Boost was really used. There were a couple missions involving enemies or turrets that shoot fast lasers that cannot be dodged by regular movement. They were the first things that hit me in the game, and the solution to them was quite clear. Quick Boost right before they hit you.
They did it. They added a dodge to Armored Core and boiled down the challenge to pressing a button right before you get hit. And with that, most of my interest in later Armored Core evaporated.
Now, I might be uncharitable and the game utilizes its mechanics better later on once I get into the NG+ hard mode, and I heard Armored Core For Answer was a great improvement on 4th Gen, but I wasn’t able to emulate it without constant crashes to really find out if it can turn around my bad impression.
And with that, my journey with Armored Core ended for now. Maybe I will try For Answer once it stabilizes, but after all of that I think I got a clear idea of Armored Core and what AC6 could be like.
While we only have a cinematic trailer for Armored Core 6, the mech designs and the way they moved and attacked was very reminiscent of the older games rather than 4th Gen. Everything was much more grounded, showing inside contact bombs that explode on the floor, thrusting melee weapons, and relatively little air movement aside from big jumps and I would hope this means the gameplay is taking more cues from the older games.
It seems that the primal armor system from 4th gen (basically a Halo Shield) is still staying, and I’m not gonna kid myself, I’m sure Quick Boosting is gonna stay too, but if their challenges end up being designed around Quick Boosting at the right time I will be quite disappointed. But at least I think their mission design will actually be consistently strong this time around and focus on emphasizing the most fun parts of the game, and I also expect them to retain the depth of the mech-building. As long as they got those right I’m excited to see whatever it is they are cooking with AC6, but I won’t be surprised if I ultimately still like the older games more. Already cooking up my hater opinion huh? 😦
That’s all, thanks for reading.
oh wait check out the mechs i made
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