New post! Over 14000 Words on Armoured Core (video coming ASAP!) (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

TLDR - was trying to get the video done before the month's end (marking the deadline for putting up a charged Patreon post) but, as you can tell from the size of this script, it's not going to happen—so I've decided to put up the script while I finish things off. Hoping to get it done and posted here before the weekend. As always, don't worry—you'll only be charged once, for this post. The actual video post in the next few days won't be charged.

I cannot tell you all how much I appreciate your patience and support—this project ended up way bigger than I anticipated, putting even my Hitman videos to shame, so by doing this it means I can keep working away without having to worry about income too much. Basically, you're getting about seven normal videos' worth of text/eventual video here. I am very sorry for the delay and sincerely hope you can understand.

Now that's out of the way, the project itself! When FromSoftware surprised announced Armoured Core 6: Fires of Rubicon at the 2022 Game Awards, it took a lot of people by surprise, expecting the now veteran developers to instead capitalise on the incredible success of Elden Ring, released earlier in the year. For as excited as people are for a new game from the Souls developer, the mech series hasn't quite captured the mainstream imagination in the same way—after so long without any releases in this already inscrutable franchise, a lot of people don't even really know what Armoured Core is.

I was one of those people, until I took it upon myself to play a whole bunch of the Armoured Core games... and came away genuinely thinking it might be one of my favourite series ever. In this piece, I'll give a newcomer's perspective analysing all the key numbered entries, some of the spin-offs, charting the trajectory of the series' trademark customisation and mech combat—explaining why it's so thrilling, as well as interrogating why there arguably isn't Dark Souls without Armoured Core charting that path. This series really is unbelievably good, and I can't recommend it enough—let's talk about why.

Thanks so much once again for allowing me to keep working on projects like this, and I hope you enjoy this absolute behemoth of a video when it's ready in the next few days!

You're the best!

Thanks,

Hamish

Writing on Games

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When announcing their upcoming project at 2022’s Game Awards, FromSoftware knew what they were doing. Not a year earlier, the company had released Elden Ring—the game that took the Souls formula they had been honing for over a decade, and catapulted it even past the cult fandom it had accrued up to that point. That very game was about to win Miyazaki and co the top prize at this very event.

Elden Ring wasn’t only mainstream, it was the biggest game release in years. It was all anyone could talk about, and so, despite the game’s gargantuan size and density of secrets, ten months from its release, talk was already rampant about what the studio had in store next for Elden Ring, or hell, even that Bloodborne PC port everyone has been craving.

And when the big reveal occurred, with host Geoff Keighley clearly tingling with awkward anticipation, so began a cinematic, in which FromSoft played directly into said anticipation. Talk of feeding the fire and the last cinders burning saw the developer place established series language against footage that felt as if it could have been lifted directly from Dark Souls. Elden Ring DLC in the Dark Souls universe, here we go!

And then a big robot appeared.

The FromSoft logo was probably enough to get people incredibly hyped (a rather amusing, heartening signifier of the developer’s completed transition from the mid-tier status it once had to a marker of quality), but as the trailer went on and it presented dazzling image after dazzling image, it became more and more obvious that this had nothing to do with Elden Ring or Bloodborne or Souls of any kind.

At the end of it all, a robot enters combat mode and the flare from its thrusters reveals the title – Fires of Rubicon, a return to FromSoft’s other franchise, Armoured Core; the sixth numbered instalment in the decades long franchise. You could see from the comments that this was something that made a portion of the audience unbelievably happy… and seemed to have far more people asking, “OK, this looks cool! How much like Elden Ring is this going to be?!”

See, for as dedicated as its fanbase is, I’d say Armoured Core is a franchise currently occupying the kind of niche that the Souls games once did. The wider audience now knows what Soulsborne games are all about after all this time, and so speculation inevitably turned to how FromSoft might modernise Armoured Core to meet audience expectations.

I mean, I have to admit, I was one of those people. My familiarity with the Armoured Core series more or less extends to an old demo disc I got with the first game on it, and while it was a loooong time ago, I remember it seeming very odd and complicated and, despite my love of giant mechs, it’s not something I ever really thought to delve into.

Critical reception (which, back in the day, was something that could very much make or break a game’s popularity) saw the series framed as this weird curio that would put out all kinds of sequels to sequels and spin offs, with none of them really grabbing the attention of the wider critical sphere (as evidenced by a very funny video lightly poking fun at Keighley’s aforementioned deferential gravitas, as he talks about the ground-breaking new reveal from this venerated developer, placing it alongside footage of his review of Armoured Core 4, which he totally trashes before awarding a 4 out of 10 – it’s fine, as the video states, a lot has changed since 2006).

The intro splash screens of these games reveal a cavalcade of different publishers appearing alongside FromSoft – some respected, a lot odd, many that don’t exist anymore – all suggesting that this series was something of a hot potato, with no one publisher wanting to commit to anything longer than a chance taken, making it all the more surprising that it maintained as consistent a release schedule as it did for so long.

What I’m saying is, like a lot of people, the series never grabbed me. I looked at this trailer for 6 and thought “this looks awesome, but it’s a cinematic trailer, you can’t really take much concrete information from that.” That is, until I decided to go back and play the older games to check them out for myself.

Indeed, after a slight adjustment period that I’ll outline in a minute… and subsequently rolling credits on almost every numbered AC entry (it’s complicated), as well as a number of the spin-offs and sequels (but not all of them, again it’s complicated, and doubtless this piece will annoy certain people wondering why I didn’t go in-depth on their favourite AC game, sorry in advance)… over the span of a few weeks?

I’ve found that yes, of course it is a very different series to Soulsborne in a lot of ways—I imagine some people are going to feel a bit alienated entering the Fires of Rubicon… and there’s also now a significant part of me that doesn’t want FromSoft to try and emulate or match the Elden Ring experience in almost any way. Despite the significant differences between instalments, and the very real ways in which it has seemingly influenced the Soulsborne formula, Armoured Core is very much its own thing and I, for one, want that identity to be preserved as much as possible.

All this to say… why don’t more people talk about how incredible this series is? Why didn’t someone tell me sooner? Where has Armoured Core been all my life?!

Obviously that’s a joke, it’s been right there the whole time, my ignorance is on me, but I cannot remember the last time an entire series that had just been out there, ready to play, had gone on to hook me quite like Armoured Core has. I cannot stop thinking about this goddamn series. What’s more, while the two series are very different, I don’t think a developer ends up making Soulsborne quite the way it emerged and evolved, without first having Armoured Core in their catalogue.

The barrier to entry is high relative to other, more accessible fare (which, combined with the amount of releases boasting changes that, on the surface, aren’t immediately noticeable, is probably why critical reception was so lukewarm towards the series over the years), but if you can get past all that, there really is a bounty of riches to discover.

The games are so fun in their own distinct ways, that have been really interesting to examine in such close proximity to one another – each taking that core (no pun intended) of super satisfying mech combat and altering, to varying extents, the level of weightiness between instalments; how forgiving getting to grips with said combat can be (ranging from “eh, fairly” to “the complete polar opposite”); the ridiculously in-depth customisation system that really allows you to play your own way, while constantly having to weigh up the many consequences of any choice made, both in menus and in the heat of battle; and setting it all against the backdrop of some of the thickest, most well-realised sci-fi mech dystopian atmosphere I’ve seen in games since Dark Souls… and this whole series preceded Souls by over a decade.

Let me put it this way – that cinematic trailer that I thought you couldn’t gauge any real info from? It now has me more excited for Armoured Core 6 than any other video game – I can’t stop watching and rewatching it, because not only does it look cool, that’s what Armoured Core actually plays like. There’s a very high chance that this is what 6 will actually look like.

And what’s more, while it might not look like it initially, while indeed future instalments would take great strides to increase things like flow and mobility beyond the PS1 original… everything I said about the upcoming Fires of Rubicon, I knew as soon as I started to make my way into 1997’s Armoured Core 1.

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There’s a real feeling, when booting up the early Armoured Cores, that this is a series remarkably disinterested in being liked. 1997 was the time of manuals, not in-depth tutorialisation—the sentimental value we attribute to those little booklets belies their very real function back in the day; if you didn’t read them, there was a fair bit of guesswork ahead of you when you booted up that new game you’d just rented from Blockbuster or whatever. But Armoured Core goes further than mere mechanical guesswork—there’s a coldness built directly into the game’s systems, its themes and tone, that it feels like it wants to make clear to you ASAP.

There’s no button layout for you to scroll through before your first encounter; hell, there’s no menu at all. You get told to sit your Raven exam, whatever that is, and immediately you’re under fire from multiple hostiles jumping around, that will get the better of you incredibly quickly—only heightening the absurdity of trying to get to grips with the barrage of visual information on screen, the weapons, the ammo counts, the numbers vs the big green bar, the bizarre targeting reticule, and how any of it translates to a control setup that, initially, reads as similarly dense and impenetrable.

Forget boosting or flying around the arena to match your opponents’ agility and elegantly take them out, you’re just trying to figure out how to look up and down—the most basic of mechanical function, and you’re left scratching your head under intense pressure to get a grip on it. It isn’t just an issue of Armoured Core being a pre-DualShock game either, existing before the standardisation of right analogue for camera controls—as we’ll see, that feature didn’t make it into these games for a long time to come.

No, this control scheme, as initially awkward and insane as it seems is, at least on some level, a key aesthetic choice, in line with the game’s general vibe—this tutorial, as that’s still what it is essentially, is way more about getting you on board with the kind of experience you’re in for, than it is about getting you up to speed with basic controls.

Even when you know that stuff, you have to realise that you’re in for a bumpy ride—Armoured Core’s world is one that flat out doesn’t care about you, or anything else for that matter, outside of how much of a stranglehold one corporation has over this desolate, post-apocalyptic wasteland versus another. You are but one of many similar cogs in that nihilistic machine, prepped to be shoved into that ongoing meat grinder for seemingly very little purpose other than… temporarily dodging the inevitability of ever-dwindling resources, I suppose.

I know this because, well, I didn’t get to engage with Armoured Core’s key selling point – its array of customisation options - for a surprisingly long time. The garage, the shop is all accessible from the moment you complete that initial test, but I was locked out of it. This is because, after barely making it out of the tutorial and proceeding to fail the first couple of missions thanks to me being no more competent at controlling this hulking mech that felt as if it could barely turn around to meet the enemies and projectiles whizzing past and through me, I was instead just desperately fighting to clear the debt I’d accrued incredibly early on—an endeavour that ultimately proved futile.

See, outside of a few key missions, Armoured Core doesn’t end when you fail—said sortie, selected from a menu, is but one event in this all-encompassing war between the corporations Chrome and Murakumo Millennium. You got hired to do a job, you failed, that job is gone now—on the plus side, you didn’t die, you can go back to that job board, but you now have to contend with the fact that your machine isn’t going to pay for itself. That job was an opportunity to make money, and instead it sent you into the red. In Armoured Core, failure doesn’t come cheap.

The game allows you to sell parts to make money, but of course missions still require a full, functioning mech to enter a sortie with, so until you can crawl back out of the red, you’re stuck with what you’ve got. The mission difficulty grows, battles feel decidedly harder fought, and yet your reward at the end of a mission that required such Herculean effort, is offset by the increased costs of repairs and extra ammunition that you needed to expend to get just past that finishing line—and so there you are, breathlessly awaiting your winnings, and through the medium of a cold, silent stat screen, you find that successfully completing the mission actually cost you money. By playing the game, you are worsening your debt spiral.

You maybe gloss over the fact that every job you take on, every sortie through pitch black, grotty sewers and cities seemingly devoid of humanity, often for directly competing corporate interests, with each party telling you they’re not the bad guy, it’s the other guy doing the exact same thing as us that’s the bad guy… all said jobs seem to exclusively involve eliminating service workers expressing disdain for their abhorrent conditions at the hands of your paymasters—said overlords stating pretty starkly that this could harm their public image, and so people need to die.

But you don’t care, a job’s a job—what else is there to do here? What life is there but one enveloped by debt, by the need to just get by, to get through one more job, to stave off debt for one moment longer… despite the fact you know you’ll never shake it, only tightening the corporation’s grip over you, over everyone?

Being broke, as it turns out, is pretty taxing, fiscally, physically, spiritually; it often feels like there’s no way out, and as we can see through real life governments capitalising on things like petrol and food shortages and strikes as means of reducing human rights, and increasing their control over populations (you know, “times are tough and confusing and we’re the only ones that can steer you through it”) while somehow, coincidentally, companies are able to make record profits off of human misery… and, despite its heightened sci-fi setting there’s something that feels, if not “true to life” per se, remarkably comprehensive about the dystopia of Armoured Core’s world.

And look, I realise we haven’t even gotten into what is so legitimately great about Armoured Core’s gameplay yet, but even on my first attempt where I failed miserably, that carefully constructed atmosphere was so thick, so carefully built and oppressively grim, that it was hard not to be enthralled by it—especially when such a cohesive thematic structure was coming from this clunky old PS1 game that released before Metal Gear Solid. Seriously, while the plot itself here isn’t super fleshed out—a trait that will continue throughout the series to varying extents—if Soulslike worldbuilding and deconstructing lore from item descriptions is your thing, there seems to be as rich a tapestry being spun as the company’s future works.

But on that note, it’s easy to say that “well, this is the company that would go on to create the Souls series, what did you expect?” and I feel it’s important to mention that the director of that series, Hidetaka Miyazaki, the one credited with cultivating the similarly oppressive Soulsborne atmosphere, didn’t join FromSoftware until they were halfway through development on Last Raven—a PS2 instalment that didn’t release until 2005—and he didn’t direct any of the games until Armoured Core 4, released a year later. No one knows the inner workings of this studio that’s remained even more shrouded in mystery than most, but if there was any influence to be had, it would have been Armoured Core that shaped Miyazaki’s approach to worldbuilding—not the other way around.

And of course FromSoft has been pretty liberal over the years in transferring items, characters, nomenclature between different game series, but even beyond the mention of the Dark Soul organisation or the appearance of the Moonlight Blade, perhaps the most prominent similarity I found between the two games was the way it handled failure.

See, while Armoured Core might seem completely brutal and uncaring, it does want you to get through it—it’s still seeking to be an enjoyable game. And so, when you reach a certain level of debt, the game resets automatically, just with a boost to your combat capabilities like constantly equipped radar, freeing up a space on your mech to equip more weaponry, or enhanced booster performance so your mobility increases. And every time you reach that level of debt and do the whole game over, these benefits stack until you basically become an unstoppable killing machine, readily able to mow down whatever gets in your way. It’s like the opposite of a new game plus mode—it’s giving struggling players a boost so they can play more effectively.

The thing is, this whole mechanic is framed in-game as the Human Plus project—a means by which the corporations render you unfit for purpose in this world, and so take you in, augmenting you with equipment that more effectively suits their purposes. They’ve taken a world so devoid of humanity, and managed to find a way to bleed that stone even dryer. Sound familiar?

It’s hollowing from the Souls games, it’s becoming tarnished—it’s the gradual erasure of your humanity, the thing that, if you just beat enough bosses and get enough currency, you’ll be able to claw back, right? That is until you inevitably fail again and it slips out of reach once more. There’s arguably a great deal more nihilism inherent to the first Armoured Core as you just fight and fight and fight through this awful world, with the only end in sight being that you will lose your humanity at some point; compared to the relative absurdism of the Souls series, which to me more prominently asks questions of how one might find the beauty, the value of existing in a world as seemingly dead as the ones found in Souls games.

But similar to those titles, all of these themes are tied directly to your gameplay—every mechanic, every system shares a narrative or thematic purpose… while also just being really goddamn fun at the same time. I myself ended up not going down the Human Plus route, manually restarting my save before the corpos got a hold of me, and that second go-around, now equipped with some limited knowledge of my way around a cockpit (as well as a couple of pointers from some beginner guides, and a fantastic video by Josh Strife Hayes), proved to be far more illuminating as to the game’s very real mechanical charms.

Yeah, it’s clunky to begin with, the claw-like grip with which you sometimes find yourself holding the controller might seem mental, but it is something that’s possible to get used to – feeling like the perfect representation of a corporation only interested in producing more cannon fodder, plonking you in a mech cockpit and saying “learn this or die”.

At the start, you’re focused on finding any means of staying alive possible. You might not be able to run or turn very fast, and so it helps when your mission (which almost all consist of addictively bite-size chunks of combat, lasting from 1-5 minutes) takes place on a narrow bridge – giving you time to figure out at what distances enemies become a real threat to you, the points at which you can snipe them from afar, the dangers of being out in the open as opposed to hunkering down behind cover, positioning enemies in such a way that you can take advantage of friendly fire—using their ammo to consume yours (which, given that there’s no health or ammo refills during missions, can make all the difference between a successful sortie and a failure). It’s all knowledge you can then take into the more open environments of certain sorties, using whatever tactics and cover you can muster. It’s panicked, but it’s delightfully tense.

And then one mission, instead of awarding money, gifts me a new set of legs. Now that I’m not so catastrophically in debt, I decide to finally engage with the customisation options – and this is where I fully fall in love with Armoured Core. The lightweight legs I’m provided suddenly open the game up in a way I could never have envisioned.

Previously an enemy flying behind me could leave me in a super precarious spot, because turning was a whole event in itself, taking several seconds for me to translate what it was I wanted to achieve to this control scheme I wasn’t used to, as well as the molasses-like speed at which the physical manoeuvre took place. Now, I’m jetting around the battlefield (not literally, that comes later); I’m not cowering from enemies, I’m seeking them out – I’ve gotten the strafing controls down and can finally outrun some of these hostiles.

My gun is pretty weak though, probably would be wise to invest in something slightly more powerful – and hey, these missiles I’m using are costing me a whole lot of money to actually use, so why don’t I sell the launcher and use that to pick up not only a nicer weapon with more ammunition, but a more effective generator. The things I really need to be looking out for are keeping my mech’s energy levels high enough to power all these new parts I want (so going with the top of the line generator makes a whole lot of sense), but also that the legs can physically support them all too.

I upgrade to quad legs as a result, which comes with the added benefit of being able to fire shoulder weapons without needing to stop in my tracks and aim – enemy fire is constant, and so I’m still interested in staying nimble. And because I can now sell every part on my mech to gain extra funds for new models, and there’s no loss of value if I decide to sell something back, there’s no real risk to trying out builds and weapons that I might have otherwise avoided.

Hopefully you get my point – every single decision made in the shop and garage screen not only comes with its own series of considerations and consequences that need to be offset, that can fundamentally change how you play the game, but give you a more thorough understanding of your own mech, what you want out of it, the path you want to take so it can help you fight more effectively; each upgrade moving you away gradually from the hunk of junk you started with, and into that realisation that, above all else, Armoured Core is just a really video-game-ass video game.

Give it enough time, and you’re eventually hammering on buttons with a frequency and intensity that makes it look as if you were a character playing a fake game in a movie. The action of Armoured Core is as weighty as it is delightfully frenetic – eventually seeing you meet even other ACs (units that have heightened abilities compared to their grunt counterparts) in glorious, anime-style combat; staring each other in the face as you boost strafe across endless desert planes, desperately trying to hold onto that lock; more powerful weapons shrinking the trademark square aiming reticule, and more agile enemies requiring you to keep an eye on the boost meter used to keep up with them – ensuring you don’t spend it all, and have to endure that agonising wait for it to fill all the way back up.

The charm of Armoured Core lies in all these micro decisions you’re having to make at every turn, under intense pressure—pressure that can sometimes get the best of you, even when you think you’ve got a specific technique nailed down. There’s just so much to keep an eye on at any given time, and training yourself to become more efficient in that process, becoming more familiar with the workings of your mech, is downright thrilling.

And just like the worry of becoming destitute hastens your willingness to dehumanise the conflicts you wade into with squatters and unions and the like, so to does your ever-growing combat ability – Armoured Core is so fun, it makes upgrading your mech such a well-earned and personal endeavour, that for me, I couldn’t wait to get in the action once more, the morality and ethics of fighting for all these different factions be damned. I am a killing machine. Everything is connected here, and it bears repeating – this is a PS1 game released in 1997.

Despite it being my first console, with some immensely cherished memories attached to it as a result, I rarely find myself going back to the platform, instead opting mainly for the heightened fidelity and fluidity of PS2 games. Armoured Core is the exception to that preference – in every regard, from gameplay to storytelling, I have been shocked at how well this holds up. It isn’t perfect, of course—the fact that you’re manoeuvring the camera as if by crank isn’t helped by the many, many times it’ll get stuck on geometry, and the lock on often sees you awkwardly fidget around as you look directly at the thing you’re trying to destroy, because the game has decided some other thing vaguely in the reticule takes priority. There are some moments where that awkwardness becomes harder to justify as being part of the experience of navigating this complex piece of industrial machinery—but even with all that detritus, compared to so many of its PS1 contemporaries, it still feels so modern.

Look, despite a final level that really puts a damper on what preceded it – going from uniquely intense action game to an utterly excruciating platformer its control setup was not built for, taking the camera from the occasionally awkward territory it previously inhabited to an absolutely unbearable nightmare – after beating the game, I’ve been going back to that cinematic trailer for Fires of Rubicon pretty constantly. It’s a thrilling trailer on its own, for sure, but where I initially viewed it as hard to gleam any real information from, given its cinematic nature, I now look at it and become even more excited, thinking “this game will look like this.”

Even from that first title released over 25 years ago, its action is so surprisingly flexible and intense, that I can already perform some of the moves seen in the trailer for a game that hasn’t been released yet. Seriously, I can’t overstate this enough – Armoured Core might have its quirks, its awkwardness at times, but it’s good enough on its own that you can just play it as a big fun mech game. As far as that type of game goes, this is still cream of the crop stuff. It’s the way it’s all contextualised against this wider world built by FromSoftware that elevates it to the level of a title that transcends its place as a historical touchstone.

This isn’t the kind of game where you appreciate its cultural value to get to the next, more polished instalment—if you’re thinking about getting into the series, play the original Armoured Core—especially as we’re about to see that Armoured Core isn’t a game that necessarily gets better with a new coat of pain, and that it represents such a delicate balance of systems and mechanics, that taking this formula to another generation becomes a lot more complicated than you might think.

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When you think of generational jumps within the same franchise, I think it’s safe to assume some kind of clean-up, both technical and mechanical—the first game got them out the gate, now they have the chance to really refine the ideas they must have been going for in the last title, but were possibly held back by, I dunno, platform limitations. 

It's interesting when you boot up Armoured Core 2 then, released three years later as part of the PS2's launch line up, and find that it's basically is basically just Armoured Core 1 with a slightly new coat of paint. The environments are still drab—deliberately so; maybe some are slightly bigger, more labyrinthine in nature, but the menus no longer look as if you’ve just opened a rudimentary PowerPoint filled with Wordart. It’s got that kind of Metal Gear Solid 2-esque “Hexagonal Future Grime” to it—everything is bold and neon tinged, right up until the point you’re in the action and you find that, well, war is still hell.

In fact, this expansion of the themes I outlined in Armoured Core 1 is definitely one of the more impressive points of the sequel. It’s at this stage I realise that actually trying to connect all the dots here to get the complete picture of the plot here, is neither something I’m going to be able to effectively do, nor would I particularly want to—Elden Ring marked perhaps my limit as far as FromSoft’s lore-based storytelling goes. But in this instance especially, I think that confusion, that fatigue might be kind of the point?

Your actions at the end of 1 didn’t change anything for the better, if anything the problems only intensified. Even trying to escape a barren Earth to find a future elsewhere (namely Mars), the wrath of corporations can’t be escaped. Mercenaries are still required to kill people in exactly the same way they did on Earth—for pointless furthering of monied interests, just with more competing factions to take into account, or not; your purpose is still just to get paid. Taking out Leos Klein, the head honcho of the Frighteners, the mercenaries being hired by corporation Zio Matrix to overthrow what government still remains in this hellscape… it’s just another job, maybe with a slight degree of urgency.

There’s a lot more talk of your pilot’s ability this time around—making it all the more gut-wrenching when you actually start to receive complements from fellow AC pilots, and they suddenly turn on you. Your ability, your humanity is a threat in this world. You are not a person, you’re competition. It all represents a really admirable dedication to maintaining and meaningfully expanding that atmosphere that so elevated its predecessor beyond its already amazing mech combat.

But other than a slightly more ambitious narrative scope, Armoured Core 2’s design, is still remarkably similar to the first game—hell, some missions are straight up lifted wholesale. You still start with a Raven test whose corridor crawl this time around, is slightly more forgiving than its predecessor’s wide open arena, but is equally as dispassionate in its delivery of objectives, and just as keen to avoid explaining absolutely anything to you about how this thing is meant to control. Graphically things look like the developers probably envisioned them looking first time round—but control-wise, I remapped the same buttons I did previously (I found that switching the shoulder buttons to aim and strafe made more sense to me personally), to play more or less the same game I played previously.

And you might think, “isn’t that enough? You loved the last game, so isn’t this just more of a good thing?” Well, yes and no. Don’t get me wrong here, I still enjoyed my time with 2 a good deal, but if you were to ask me which game in the series I’d want to return to, the second would probably be at the bottom of my list honestly.

The problem isn’t with the control scheme to be clear—that initial clunkiness and finding your own ways of overcoming it, is a key aspect of Armoured Core’s identity—it’s that, with the few updates 2 does bring to the table, it illustrates that even small changes to this framework can completely alter the balance of things; bringing into proceedings a clunkiness all of its own.

The introduction of extra sections of your AC to consider upgrading—the inside weapon, the radiator, etc.—combined with the sheer volume of new parts relative to the first game that are just immediately available to you, should in theory heighten the flexibility afforded in just how deeply you can customise your mech, but in reality only serve to increase the amount of things you need to keep an eye on, the systemic fires you need to be putting out at any given time during a mission.

This kind of messing with the dials, so to speak, increasing or reducing the importance of certain aspects of customisation, is a design consideration that will be honed and evolve as the series progresses, but as far as 2 goes, what resulted for me was a kind of crippling frustration, that left the play experience feeling more hollow, forgettable than the first game—those missions lifted from 1 offering a direct comparison of just how much more I enjoyed playing that original, than this identity crisis of a sequel.

See, for one, something as simple as level geometry is far less consistent, leaving me second guessing which terrain I could plow through like I could in 1 vs which bits of rubble would now see me awkwardly having to circumnavigate; the increased fidelity arguably leaving things like switches and destructible objectives less distinguishable in-world; making me wonder if this was actually the button or switch I needed to interact with. But on top of that, the second or third mission saw minion level foes stun lock me in a way I don’t recall ever happening in the first game—Armoured Core was clunky, but this felt like a whole other level. And now you’re telling me that, thanks to that booster upgrade, I’m overheating as well? God, I just need to find something, any combination of parts that work, quick!

And so, I upgraded my legs to something more nimble, then to a quad, I bought a new rifle, all near the start of the game… and that more or less carried me through about three quarters of Armoured Core 2’s runtime—it worked, and I simply didn’t have the energy to mess with that; to search this labyrinthine store looking for the most marginal of upgrades (that, remember, I still had to consider in the grander context of how much more costly increased ammo capacity would be in the long run). This build got me by, so I went with it.

That was, up until one mission introduced multiple flying ACs that required slightly more mobility than my build was able to accommodate, which required a bit more time spent in the store, but at that point I had so much money, built up from mission upon mission with no upgrades, that picking out a new build that got me over the finish line was a rather trivial endeavour.

Less my own machine, whose gradual upgrades felt truly earned, heightening my attachment to my own creation, and more a disparate set of parts I had to be ready to ditch in an instant should a mission specific obstacle require it. Such vast increases in the gear available, and the resultant uncertainty of just how noticeable an upgrade said gear would be to my current build, created a sense of option paralysis that just wasn’t there in the first game, that led me to engage far less with this crucial aspect of the series.

Like I say, there is an extent to which More Armoured Core is inherently a good thing. I enjoyed my time with 2, but while side-by-side visual comparison might make it seem like an obvious choice in terms of a starting point for newcomers—ya know, do you want the PS1 original, or basically that same game with enhanced visuals and more customisation options—but what that first game lacked in visual fidelity, it more than makes up for in focus and consistency, rendering 2 an interesting but awkward first step to fleshing out the bones of this mechanical framework, rather than the generational leap forward that would render its predecessor obsolete.

At the very least, however, its last mission wasn’t quite as nightmarish as what came before, although it did require me to basically stay stuck in a corner, camera issues be damned, because it was the only way for me to effectively lock onto the big alien enemy that greets you once Klein goes down (I know, Armoured Core is weird). If only there could be some kind of refinement to the core action here, that could actually give us that aforementioned leap forward.

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Enter Armoured Core 3.

It was legitimately hard to tell at first whether my proficiency with 3’s early stages relative to the first two games was merely a result of suddenly having all this experience with those prior titles or if it was actually representative of a more fluid set of mechanics, because visually things are very similar to 2—your near-identical looking mech cruising through futuristic but empty, grim cities, barren deserts, endless industrial corridors and the like, with seemingly no humans in sight.

Regardless of what it was, however, experience or an actual fundamental upgrade, all I knew was that man, Armoured Core 3 feels good to play right out of the gate—there isn’t quite the period of getting used to things as there was in prior titles.

Zooming around the battlefield, using my boosters to handily dodge missiles while hitting enemies with a barrage of rifle fire of my own (rifle fire, I should add, that seems to take these enemies down in slightly less hits than before, my boosters seem to be able to keep me going for slightly longer), before getting in close enough that I can finish off whatever stragglers remain with a single, elegant swipe of my laser blade.

I guess that’s the word for it. Immediately, there’s an elegance to the way that Armoured Core 3 controls—it all just feels so natural, every action a flowing extension of the last, rather than the rigid stop-start affair of having to stop firing because the enemy flew behind you, so you can slowly turn around, then once you’re in position aim your reticule, all while hoping the enemy hasn’t cut you to ribbons in the process.

Here, you feel like the king of the battlefield—there are points where it really does feel like you’re orchestrating your own anime-style duals, it’s all so responsive and flexible, while still retaining that feeling of weight and scale that lets you know how hard you’re hitting. On every level, the action out of the box here feels like the perfect refinement and balancing of systems, the true generational leap that 2 should have been.

Further, the strategic options available to you have increased as well. It’s not explained to you and it requires a frankly odd combination of button combinations that’s difficult to remember and execute in the heat of battle, but should you run out of ammunition you now have the option to shake off that dead weight—launching the weapon in question off of your mech for increased mobility. Personally I barely used the feature, but it was nice to know that it was there—one more trick in my arsenal, increasing the depth of mech mastery for those seeking it out.

Further, 3 is the first numbered entry in the series where consorts are introduced—where, for certain missions, you get given the opportunity to take an AI controlled partner into a sortie for a portion of the mission payment, ranging from grunts right up to full-blown ACs.

It’s not a game-changer by any means—the AI in question seems to be pretty lacklustre, in some cases only managing to enter a room about a minute or so after I’ve gone in and cleared it out (it seems that enemies and allies alike have a real problem dealing with doors generally in these games), and in other cases they can sometimes actively get in the way—remember, friendly fire is a thing in these games, and on some occasions actually saw an accidental shot turn my ally into an enemy I subsequently had to manage, seems as if there’s a great deal more room for actual emergent moments of gameplay narrative here—but hey, at the very least, if you anticipate that things are going to get hairy in a mission, they can at least draw fire from enemies as bait. Hmmm, I wonder if the game has been conditioning me to view other human beings piloting these things with the same kind of disposability the in-game corporations view me? Who could possibly say?!

And what’s more, this heightened flexibility afforded to how I approach the in-game action extends to the customisation—when I know things can be this responsive, can feel this good, suddenly I feel a whole lot more incentivised to actually take my time experimenting with different load outs, rather than being irritated to the point of just finding what works and sticking with it.

It’s a good thing as well, because while 3 starts out comparatively breezy, the difficulty spike seen in its last third or so is one of the more intense across the whole series—using the same kinds of shock twists where an ally will turn on you mid-mission, except they’ll chuck in an extra AC to manage simultaneously, after your resources and health have been drained by grunt enemies swarming the arena. There was a while there were I wondered if I was going to be able to beat 3 as a result—it was a game I had to come back to once I’d beaten the rest.

But that’s just it—it’s a game I kept thinking about, I wanted to come back and exist some more in this mechanical playground, figure out my own way through these challenges – because by this point I have completely lost interest in the actual plots of these games, but 3 represents such a sweet spot between the heft and agility of its action, the manageability of its customisation systems, that I finally feel as if the game is providing the tools of self-expression necessary that I get to craft my own narratives during gameplay.

The atmosphere still very much grounds it as a grim, post-apocalyptic affair—as I say it still feels like the game is asking questions about the morality of this kind of action feeling this good, of using tactics that might put others at risk, etc.—but 3, while looking very similar to the game that came before, separates itself as the kind of experience you could excitedly chat about with your pals about the various hijinks that got you and you alone through any given mission.

How you were laser focused on an enemy AC, running around the battlefield, but your consort managed to get in the way, turning on you in an instant just as you’ve run out of ammo, so you choose to blast off your weapons and try to chase them down with a laser blade, exploiting the AI’s propensity to get stuck on walls and timing your emergence from makeshift cover just right to get a couple of swipes in here or there, before that chance moment where they both happen to be in the same place and you can swoop in, ending them both with a singular slash, just like in the trailer for 6!

It still has the patented Armoured Core Clunk, there’s still issues with camera and lock on, it’s not suddenly running at Ninja Gaiden speed or anything like that—you are still required to really feel out and learn your preferred style of mech piloting, but it feels like the shifting of certain sliders relating to how responsive the controls are, finally lets you look as cool as you probably think mech combat should, in the process.

For one, you can no longer sell everything. Even in the garage, you must have a core equipped at all times, which seems a bit arbitrary if I’m honest. You still can’t enter a mission without, say, legs, arms or a radiator, but at least in the main game you can still sell those off to boost your credits before heading back into the store, taking you over the edge to buy that new upgrade you were just short of affording through mission rewards alone.

It was a great system, and especially seeing as the core is often one of the more expensive parts, the part that can have such a massive impact on different aspects of your mech’s performance, its weight, its defence, the irritation of thinking “god, why can’t I just swap my current part for this upgraded core? I’m going to be selling the old one back anyway, I don’t need both,” is an irritation that builds up quickly.

2003’s Silent Raven and 2004’s Nexus, the two expansions, take things even further—the former, assuming you’ve already played through the original game, expects you to import your save from that game, with all the parts and credits you’ve earned from that initial playthrough, rendering the already pretty paltry mission rewards (relative to 3) as pretty restrictive if you’re just starting out here, and useless if you’re not.

Nexus, on the other hand, strips away the ability to sell cores, arms, legs, head, any part deemed essential to enter a mission, unless you’ve already bought a replacement and are ready to equip it. Here it’s countered by the comparatively massive mission rewards even early on (representing up to five or six times what you’d get paid in one of the other games for the same job), but in doing so, Nexus strips out one of the most user-friendly features of the entire customisation system—the ability to truly experiment, by chucking your old parts away and taking a punt on something you’ve never tried before, knowing you can sell it back for its original value should it not work for you.

Further, Nexus alters the balance, the importance of managing energy output and subsequent heat generated, in a way that I imagine is supposed to reintroduce some more of that decision-making tension back into proceedings that 3’s mechanical upgrades might have smoothed out—but in reality the constant drawbacks introduced to what were meant to be part upgrades left me feeling as powerless as I did early on in 2, where I really struggled to find a satisfying balance of mobility and controlled booster output, that didn’t absolutely cook my AC to the point—draining its health to the point of being basically unusable.

Now none of this is to say that these games aren’t fun in their own right, that there isn’t any value to them, far from it (I mean Nexus is the first game in the series to feature dual stick controls, which feels really weird, but we’ll talk about that more in a bit). They just serve as an interesting example of how, when it comes to the Armoured Core formula, even the slightest of alterations to the way one or two features work, pushing one slider just to the left or right, will have a knock-on effect on every single other aspect of the game’s design. Despite the intimidatingly massive range of options available to players, it’s all such a careful balancing act on FromSoft’s part—and it’s been fascinating to see it play out in such a condensed time frame like this.

I mean, there are many examples, on a sortie-to-sortie basis, of slight mechanical changes working in FromSoft’s favour across the 3 games, creating some of the most varied mission design in the series up to this point. Changes as simple as reducing the level of light in a level, messing with your ability to lock onto enemies from the distance you normally do, completely shift the atmosphere of, say, a regular forest attack, to something altogether more tense and sinister – forcing you to intuit your surroundings and gauge, in an instant, amongst the dense foliage and fog, not only where an enemy is right now, but where they might be headed. It becomes Predator by way of 08th MS Team.

There’s a whole lot of reasons, then, why if you ask someone their favourite AC game, they’re probably going to point to 3, or one of the games under the 3 umbrella. It just represents the point at which everything finally clicked into place for the series – where things were still hefty, required some time and energy from the player to really learn and get the most out of it, but where the rough edges were sanded down just slightly to more readily award players for that investment. The Armoured Core identity remains intact, but more people get to experience it. It’s a win-win. While I do genuinely think that 1 is a fantastic game in its own right, that’s well worth checking out, if you want to see this version of the series at its absolute best, sans some of its harsher elements, 3 is the place to start.

Notice how I said, “this version” of the series, by the way. That’s because, after honing the formula down, FromSoft is about to take more than a slight detour with the franchise, and Armoured Core is about to change in a pretty substantial way.

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The move between 3 and 4 marks a transition for the series in many ways. For one, it’s the point at which, suddenly, the process of emulating these games goes from simple plug and play exercises to requiring a fair bit more fiddling, to ensure you can make it past the intro screen, let alone try to get the mechs to render properly (although thanks to updates in recent months, and following said tweaking, the Armoured Core 4 era games now run pretty much perfectly with sufficient hardware—the V games, well, they’re a different story we’ll get onto in a bit).

Moreover, where the jump between 1 and 2 felt more like a paint job rather than anything truly substantial, the move to the PS3 and Xbox 360 feels more like a true generational leap—not just technically, but philosophically.

And it’s odd how you can kind of track where the series is at in that regard with its opening mission. 1 was an unforgiving introduction to the desolate brutality of this world; 2 was similarly cold, but had someone watching over your back, albeit in a judgmental capacity; 3 teamed you up with a fellow, bright eyed bushy tailed initiate for your exam. But 4 marks the first numbered entry in which the game does away with the exam format entirely—instead you’re in cyberspace, with the game getting you to repeat basic functions in a segmented, regimented way, separate from any kind of diegesis of making the team.

It’s still not a perfect tutorial—it doesn’t explain everything, what it does explain it does so textually, and given that Armoured Core is, at its centre, a puzzle of trying to pull various things off at once as efficiently as possible, breaking everything down so rigidly might not be as comprehensive in teaching players what to expect as it might seem.

That said, it’s still an actual tutorial. Building on 3’s heightened mobility out of the gate, it feels like there’s much more of an effort to ease potential players into the Armoured Core experience this time around. And given that I played through this before going back to Nexus, the sequel to 3 where dual stick aiming was finally introduced as an option, there was something legitimately jarring—as jarring as being plunked into 1’s mess of controls, honestly—about jumping into a game that, well, controlled like an actual video game. I’d spent so long internalising the old way of doing things, that to go back to something more standardised constituted a learning process all of its own.

But standardised, dare I say dumbed down, it indeed is – and don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing – but despite a presentation that, in some areas, suggests a level of sophistication, of complexity, of intricacy hitherto unseen in the series, the mechanics of 4 do signify a remarkably different, altogether more arcade-y experience than what came before.

The difficulty curve of Armoured Core games can be pretty all over the place at times – you’ll be cruising along, gradually building a mech that you become extremely effective with once you’ve learned its ins and outs, then all of a sudden, BAM – a mission whose volume and intensity of hostiles forces you to rethink your entire build, that you eventually struggle through before… a seconds-long sortie that involves little more than moving from point A to B with shockingly little in the way of hostility. It’s uneven, but it does keep you on your toes – constantly aware of the fact that anything could go down and you’ll need to think on your feet and improvise, both during combat and in the menus.

In 4 on the other hand, I can’t really remember much of anything causing me any trouble at all – where the difficulty graph charting prior AC games would resemble a failed lie detector test, in 4 it would be more of a flatline. No part of the combat system requiring much in the way of thought. The more forgiving gradation of weight limits here, replacing the strict binary found in prior games be damned; pile yourself with enough weapons and ammo that you’re not struggling mid-mission; build up a stockpile you can easily switch between in the garage, just in case a fast enemy requires slightly more consistent fire from a rail gun rather than the more straight-ahead barrage of the grenade launcher; just pick the boosters and generators with the highest blue numbers as opposed to red, because money is far less of an object here.

Indeed, less important than the time spent in the shop or garage this time, fretting over every little part to maximise the efficiency of your build, is getting to grips with the moment-to-moment manoeuvrability you’re afforded during missions (as evidenced by the fact that I found it surprisingly difficult to even find the shop this time around, given the game’s introduction of schematics – in theory a clever system to allow you to store builds and access full setups of enemies you’ve taken down, but in practice just meant more steps to get to the menus I actually wanted).

Whether you’ve picked a lightweight flight-based model or a tank, you’re going to be dealing with a lot more enemies darting much faster around the screen, seemingly as if they’re teleporting or glitching at first – a frenzied type of movement that you are meant to match, bobbing and weaving with the kind of lightning speed that would have been completely unheard of in the lumbering walking tanks of old.

Speed, how quickly you can pull off the action really is key here. Locks are far more generous, meaning that your goal when dealing with the NEXTs as they’re called here, what were previously referred to as ACs, fellow Ravens, is just to try and keep them on screen while pummelling them with as much firepower as you can hammer out. Health is higher, energy output is more generous, the threat may still be high, things can still get hairy from time to time, but almost everything about the design of 4 is geared towards people being able to fly these mechs with greater ease.

And don’t get me wrong here, it’s fun to go into a level and see everything turn into a hail of weapon fire and blade swipes and swarms of missiles and explosions like some mad anime, but I also don’t really remember a lot of what I was actually doing in 4 specifically. For one, my fear of the cutscenes crashing the emulator meant I wasn’t really able to focus on the pre-mission briefings, but in prior games skipping said segments could very much drop you right in it, when you suddenly had no idea what the objective was and what you were meant to do with it, going through an entire level, only to instinctually shoot the very thing they wanted you to bring back, costing you a whole mission.

In 4’s case, there was basically no situation where said confusion occurred, because the objective always seemed to be “here are some enemies, shoot them”. I did that, for a few hours, beat the final boss first try, and then the game ended. Maybe I had to shoot a structural beam or shoot something that chased me for a bit – at no point was there any doubt as to whether I had the ability or the build to pull that off.

4 can be a pretty great feeling action game, as far as action games go, but it very much is just one of them, where prior titles required at least slightly more thought as to how you said action would play out. Here you just zap around until the things aren’t there anymore. It’s decent, but hardly thrilling beyond its occasional visual flurries – what I assume represented an attempt to bring the franchise to a wider audience, that I don’t know proved all that successful, and I imagine had the potential to alienate a few long-time fans in the process.

4 was also the directorial debut, as it turns out, of the previously mentioned Hidetaka Miyazaki – the king of creating extremely difficult, deliberately obtuse games – making his mark on the world of game direction with the least mechanically intense, arguably most accessible version of a previously inscrutable franchise. But in its rather bland mush of ideas with which to shift the franchise to something more approachable and action focused, there was a lot of potential to focus in on some key areas, which is where the spin off sequel For Answer comes in.

Where 4 felt a little limp and lifeless in comparison to what came before, For Answer bakes this sterility into its storytelling – and the results are as bleak as you’d expect from a Miyazaki title. The dank sewers and pitch black underground cities may have lacked any direct human presence, things look… cleaner now, they’re brighter… and somehow there’s less humanity, more desolation to this whole scenario than there ever has been.

It’s an irony the game plays directly into – the corporate sheen of the pre-mission presentations resemble a four o clock meeting between office drones more than they do an outline of a military operation. There’s something delightfully unsettling about having some business-minded drone about how “this mission is totally a great opportunity for you to further your working relationship with this corporation, go knock their socks off champ!” The ultra-sleekness of the presentation contrasting sharply with the utterly barren wastelands that surround you – so abstract compared to what came before, so washed out, so smooth in that way that only the PS3 can effectively render – that the world feels more alien than ever before, as if you were still trapped in the cyberspace of 4’s tutorial.

Battlegrounds on which you try to win the admiration of faceless corporations, are the long flooded remnants of lost cities like Shanghai, whose remaining buildings you barrel through with no heed paid to its past – it’s all from so long ago that, reminiscent of Tokyo 3 found in Evangelion, its purpose has long since moved past residential comfort. As hinted at by the glorious intro, in which the sheen of White Glint’s design contrasts wildly with the land it so casually soars over, so irreversible its desolation, its annihilation, you really have to wonder… why is anyone fighting anymore? What is it people actually want here?

Of course, at the centre of the conflict is control over what little supplies remain, for the survivors of whatever great cataclysm caused this desolation, now resigned to a life in floating sky fortresses, but the aseptic nature of the corporate dressing the conflict is draped in, scream more loudly than ever before, the motivator is power. There’s nothing else. Just endless, lifeless oceans and deserts, burying what once was – the washed out greys only serving to highlight just how thoroughly any sense of colour, of vibrancy, of vitality has been sapped from the world like any other resource. It’s all part of the visual palette introduced in 4, but here it feels so much more deliberate in its implementation, like it has a real purpose in terms of atmosphere and story.

Because where prior titles had this set dressing but it didn’t really matter whether or not you picked up on its subtext, For Answer seems to really want you to think about the wider implications of what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, who you’re serving and who you’re hurting, with the answer to that last one in particular revealing itself, on a deep structural level, to be you. You’re hurting yourself.

Most games in the franchise don’t really conceive of you as anything – you’re not a character, you’re not moving your own plot forward per se. You’re just picking jobs off a board and doing them until there aren’t any jobs to pick anymore. People occasionally talk about your ability, they’ll tell you to stop doing the jobs you’re doing, the games might talk a bit about the legendary raven that rose through the ranks, but the job is the job. It’s getting done.

For Answer, on the other hand, asks you, pretty directly, if that is the only answer – the only outcome. And it does so by telling you, after the credits have rolled, to simply do it all again. I mean, it’s not as if anything has really changed from that first ending, might as well keep fighting and see if there’s another way, right? Moreso than ever the ACs you’ve been fighting have been trying to get you to consider said alternate path, so here’s your opportunity to go down it. This isn’t the first time Armoured Core has required multiple playthroughs to get the full story, or given you an ending based on your corporate allegiance, but For Answer is definitely the title where such a structure was fully fleshed out, where said playthrough paths felt anything other than arbitrary.

As a result, it’s possibly the first time I’ve actually somewhat cared about the moment-to-moment plot in one of these games, because it actually comes down, pretty directly, to your choices. You get to see first hand how destructive and pointless siding with the League is, and you get to choose missions that explore the other side of that conflict to see if it fits you better. The end results may be the same – endless war, countless people dying (with the game going to great lengths to highlight just how grim things get when you side with the NEXTs over the league) but at least it feels like I get to claim some small agency over the situation.

It’s framed really well, with the missions starting to trickle in from Line Ark being presented very similarly to any other organisation; they offer to pay you what they can because you’re still a mercenary at the end of the day – but you finally get the chance to be an active participant in the fight against the corporations that have kept you locked in such endless conflict for multiple games now.

And let me say this – my second playthrough of For Answer, I realised too late that I accidentally picked the wrong mission and locked myself out of that second ending. A good few hours of progress, wasted – normally I’d be absolutely raging about that fact. In For Answer’s case, I had absolutely zero problem going back and replaying the campaign again – because goddamn, it absolutely rules.

The more frenetic, action-focused control setup and moveset is carried over from 4, but it’s all been tightened up so that the button layout is even more conducive to zooming around the more open battlefields. But crucially, where 4 felt like such a flatline in terms of actual mission design, For Answer marks a return to the sorties of old, where you really had no idea what to expect – just at a scale that, like so many things about For Answer, has never been seen in the Armoured Core games up to this point.

Even when you’re tasked with destroying enemies, there are usually more of the radar tricks found in a game like 3 that serve to bring more tension to previously explored scenarios and environments, but the real star of the show here are the absolutely gigantic fortresses you’re tasked with bringing down to size – often requiring a good deal of strategy as to where you’d even begin with something that huge; encounters that can absolutely decimate your health if you’re not constantly moving, internalising the rhythm of countless salvos from various types of weapon bursting from these industrial behemoths, in a way that’s honestly not that far off the kind of approach you’d have to take with certain bosses from the director’s future endeavours. Suddenly, things are not only mechanically engaging, they’re tough again, they require thought and careful analysis of the enemy and your surroundings on the fly – just like the best moments of the older titles.

And side note, it’s very funny to me, as a Scottish person, to hear people freak out about the dominance of Mother Will, talk about how Mother Will has to be stopped, task you with destroying Mother Will, rejoice as Mother Will crumbles to the ground. I can assure you, it’s a joy most people here would probably share.

Hell, the central combat, the shooting, is so satisfying that, while the tactics rarely change much, For Answer was the first game in which I felt compelled to blast my way to the top of the leaderboard rankings; the schematic system making so much more sense, thanks to the story missions more effectively building up the personality of the characters and the mechs they control—multiple missions saw me come up against a particularly tough foe, using techniques that my projectile-focused build simply wouldn’t be able to achieve, making me all the more curious to explore how these foes were able to pull this stuff off—with their unlocked schematic, combined with the same abundance of currency found in 4, allowing me to conveniently purchase everything required and get to testing things out in an instant.

Indeed, shopping for and tuning your mech upgrades in For Answer feels less like the desperate, awkward struggle to get past just one more encounter found in earlier titles, and more like entering a showroom in Gran Turismo, all it’s missing is the smooth jazz—perhaps mirroring the glossier, more coldly business-like framing of the corporate war hanging over it all. For Answer weaves its narrative, its atmosphere with its gameplay in a different manner to the games that came before, but such mechanical, systemic worldbuilding and storytelling is still going on, and what’s more, it’s as effective as it’s ever been.

That said, while For Answer is fantastic, it’s one of the best straight up action games I’ve played, I don’t know that I’d call it the best Armoured Core. It’s the best version of this version of Armoured Core, but it’s also not really what comes to mind when I think of this series – I’d choose to play 3 and For Answer for completely different reasons to one another. The heft of things has been dramatically reduced, for very good reasons in For Answer’s case, but that weight was Armoured Core for me. And I think, with Miyazaki leaving the franchise, perhaps the director that replaced him (Naoyuki Takahashi) saw that too, because the actual numbered sequel that follows it, to 4 is about to go in its own direction – in some ways creating the most interesting, highest potential return to the series roots I could imagine, and in most other ways, completely shooting itself in the foot.

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So remember at the very start of this piece how I mentioned that I played through almost all of the numbered Armoured Core entries, and that it was complicated? Well, Five (or V) is that complication.

For one, where 4 and For Answer ended up running pretty flawlessly, these games (including the spin off sequel Verdict Day) were a case of RPCS3 hanging on for dear life—from what other people have been saying it’s a wonder I got as far as I did, as most people seem to suffer crashes immediately after the first mission, if they get that to that point. Whatever the case, especially during its more chaotic moments, my time with V could be described as less playing and more observing. Given that my PS3 was dead, and used copies of the game seem to cost more than a replacement console nowadays, that wasn’t a price I was willing to pay, to check out a game that, even if I did get it running flawlessly on original hardware, is already a shell of its former self.

See, V released in 2012 – a time in which online multiplayer on consoles was in its heyday, with numerous action games releasing trying to capitalise on that unbelievably lucrative market. Armoured Core, whose previous attempts at multiplayer amounted to a bunch of PvP mech battle modes (and one dedicated game way back in the day), decided it was going to get in on the online action, and so shifted its focus away from the single player campaigns of old, in favour of a PvE team-based approach to missions. A noble idea, and given that the servers were shut down almost exactly two years after the western release, one that proved unsuccessful.

The single player component that remains then, in both V and Verdict Day, if not completely gutted – there are several missions available for solo players to choose from – still feels like you’re playing a different game to the one they intended, a comparatively incomplete experience; one whose design was intended for multiple people to tackle as an ongoing online experience, and therefore where single player feels somewhat incompatible.

But the thing is, getting my hands on it for a bit at least, and reading a few reviews from the time, it doesn’t seem like the reason V got shut down so soon, why the player base dwindled, was because of the game’s ambition; no, it would appear that region-specific server issues and the series’ still prevalent issue with tutorialisation presenting a steep barrier to entry for groups had more to do with how things went down, because honestly, for every misstep, it seems like there’s at least the seed of a good idea.

4 and For Answer represented what was probably a necessary shift in the series’ trajectory in terms of increased speed and emphasis on mobility – at least an attempt to lean into the action side of things a bit more, to increase the appeal of the series. V and Verdict Day, on the other hand, seem like they’re trying to take just a few steps back, towards something resembling the older, more tactical style of play. Mechs are smaller, moving more quickly along the ground than the early titles at least, but they are very much grounded. Of course you can still jump around and over enemies and the like, but gone are the days where you’re essentially flying with near-infinite boosters across vast stretches of land in seconds – things can still get incredibly fast and frantic, but we aren’t talking For Answer levels here. Things feel suitably heavy, matching up with the general vibe of the encounters you embark upon.

Reflecting the grimdark aesthetics of similar action or war games of its time, Armoured Core V leans into what some might consider the gritty PS3 aesthetic, where everything is brown and green and kind of lifeless, but also simultaneously very, very shiny and blown out. It really reminds me of that Ace Combat game that released a year or so before, Assault Horizon, where everything was close up and shaky and, indeed, gritty, everything feeling like it’s been kinda brushed with a layer of dirt, in a way befitting the style of media released in the early 2010s.

Part of me thinks it’s this visual style that led to the introduction of scan mode as an alternative to combat—the equivalent of detective vision in the Arkham games—where, in environments as filled with overly shiny debris and weather effects as V can be, it can become quite difficult to pick out these Michael Bay Transformer-esque hostiles in the environment; in the gritty world of the PS3, forget intricate patterns—shininess is indeed the most effective camouflage.

But jokes aside, I do think that scan mode serves a larger purpose; or, at the very least contributes to the kind of game Armoured Core V is trying to be. The approach you’re encouraged to take in the V games isn’t quite as gung-ho as its predecessor – its levels are more expansively maze-like, the lead up to individual battles often requires a fair bit of trekking, often with very little happening. These are environments designed for you to take your time, to really analyse your surroundings and plan your way through, send in the recon drones available to you in order to gauge the number of enemies in any given area, then scan to see exactly where they are in any given area.

Obviously it’s nigh impossible to be completely stealthy in these games, but the tall buildings feel like they’re designed to be snaked around, trying to get the jump on your enemies from multiple different angles and using the winding streets and rubble to avoid staying out in the open too long.

It’s certainly in these moments where you feel the absence of the multiplayer focus the most, where one player would have been able to take a commander role, assigning each player to take out a specific target to achieve the objective more efficiently in a multi-tiered plan of attack, but there certainly is a charm to the more guerrilla-esque tactics encouraged by the level design. It just obviously becomes much harder when you realise that all enemy fire is subsequently honed in on you, and you wish that there was at least someone else there to draw some of the attention away even briefly. I have no idea if these missions scale based on whether you take them on solo or as a team, but they certainly feel more difficult to pull off than in prior games.

A large part of that though comes down to how much of a battle of attrition things often devolve into. The previous games were brilliant, because no matter how difficult the task ahead of you was, you knew you were almost always planning for a short, sweet, 2 to 5 minute excursion. It kept everything chugging along at a rapid pace.

In an online game, however, constantly dropping in and out of mission select screens maybe isn’t the best approach – you perhaps want to keep players engaged in-game as much as possible, and so missions are often substantially longer, even in single player. You could have spent ages completing what would have constituted a whole, maybe even a couple of missions in its predecessors, ending up mentally exhausted after draining yourself of ammo and health, and your mission handler will call up telling you they’ve updated your route to take on the next objective.

Luckily V introduces workshops, allowing (for I think the first time) the chance to repair and resupply mid-mission – a potentially genius idea, but when I’ve just spent twenty minutes methodically clearing an entire city of enemies, and you then send me into an underground railway system to catch up with and take on a fast-moving train, decimating my health with its numerous weapon emplacements, while also chasing after me with multiple, extremely capable ACs… you know, likelihood is I’m just terrible at the game and missing the point, I don’t know (my play setup is hardly the optimal way to experience this thing), but it doesn’t seem like this was built for one person to take on – even with the workshops, I just don’t feel like I have the resources for this kind of task; and at the very least, give me a bit of time to process one thing before having me immediately follow the dotted line to the next major objective.

V then, is the game I most wish I could have experienced back in the day, when I could see all this stuff functioning in the way it feels as if it was intended, because honestly, even with all these foibles, I feel like there’s a really fascinating game under the surface of V – some truly ambitious ideas at play, whose failure stems not from their individual lack of merit, but the structure of the release surrounding them; V being but one of many casualties of the aforementioned chase for online-focused acclaim that didn’t materialise in a way sufficient to maintain the servers holding it up, at the expense of a complete single player experience that would have sustained the experience beyond that point at which that online switch was flipped.

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But I guess, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s not like you could easily get a hold of these games even if you wanted to – they’re all on long-obsolete consoles, never brought to new platforms, none available digitally as far as I can tell, none available on PC. Indeed, the upcoming Fires of Rubicon will mark the first time PC players especially will have been able to dip their toes into the world of Armoured Core – I’d bet for most console players, the lack of preservation, of basic availability of these games, will mean that most will have no idea what they’re actually getting into with 6. Is it any wonder, then, that we’ve seen so much questioning since that trailer dropped, about how closely AC6 will resemble the Souls games? Elden Ring?

Like, as someone who has now played the games, I can see why that questioning might be seen as odd – what do people actually mean by that? An open world? Slow, weighty melee combat? Big bosses? Mechs but written by GRR Martin and set in a fantasy world? But I dunno, I get it – FromSoft has seen such monumental success with this esoterically designed game; the audience has invested in that thing and they were understandably expecting more of that thing, only to get presented with a relatively unknown quantity, a series arguably more esoteric, less accessible than Soulsborne or Elden Ring. People are just wondering if, in Fires of Rubicon, they’ll find an experience that they can gracefully slip into following dozens of hours in Elden Ring; whether there’s the potential to be as engrossed as that game left so many.

Well, as far as I see it now, graceful isn’t necessarily in Armoured Core’s MO. This is a series you are meant to hammer away at bit by bit – one whose design, hell whose basic controls don’t gel with the standards set by other games, and who makes no bones about alienating those unwilling to meet the individual entries on their own terms. From the moment you start in this series, if you aren’t picking up what Armoured Core is putting down, it will grind you into dirt.

But if you are willing to put in the effort, you will be rewarded with bounties unseen in other titles – some of the heftiest action out there, with an extremely high skill ceiling and customisation options that, more than most games, really allow you to hone in on an individual style of play that works best for you; all of these mechanics and systems being backed up by (and themselves backing up) a truly fascinatingly constructed, mysterious world, whose details aren’t made readily apparent to you; a sense of intrigue that only deepens your connection to the intricacies and themes you do uncover, because you did the work to uncover it yourself.

Tell me, doesn’t all of this sound a bit familiar? I don’t think Armoured Core 6 is going to be an open world or have super deep melee combat or anything like that (although who really knows on the latter), it’s going to have missions and you’re going to spend a huge chunk of time in the shop and the garage kitting out your mech, rather than exploring a massive dungeon or whatever. But in terms of the mindset these games expect of you and, I should reiterate, while we still know very little about the structure of Fires of Rubicon, I can imagine Soulsborne players would be, if not comfortable, quite satisfied with the process of getting to grips with an Armoured Core game.

I would also be surprised if this upcoming sequel, with the years of experience FromSoft now has experimenting with how to make their unique games more approachable (albeit with mixed results), doesn’t make some kind of effort to introduce more quality of life features, to more effectively onboard new players – to smooth that process out a bit so even newbies can get to the really good stuff more quickly.

But if you ask me, after all this time over the last wee while, spent playing all of these games, what I now want Fires of Rubicon to be, I’m not sure I could tell you with any degree of certainty. I think if I had to pick a favourite it would be between 3 and For Answer, but I can’t remember the last time I so thoroughly enjoyed myself digging into a series like this – there are legitimately aspects of every single game I played that I would love to make the jump over to this rebirth of the franchise.

I just can’t say enough good things about Armoured Core. I’ve had a video plan brewing in my head for years entitled “where are all the good Gundam games” because despite seeming like a series so ripe for adaptation, the dozens upon dozens of attempts we’ve gotten over the years have ranged from “eh, it’s alright” to “unspeakably, unplayably bad,” with the vast, vast majority falling squarely into the latter category.

Well, turns out I, at the very least, need to rethink that video, because the answer is obvious – it’s Armoured Core. Mechanically, thematically, aesthetically, scale-wise, Armoured Core is everything I could want out of a Gundam game and more (which, coincidentally, makes it all the weirder that FromSoft has developed a number of Gundam-adjacent games that happen to… largely completely suck?).

I’m getting off point here. The point I want to make is that I’m not being hyperbolic in saying that Armoured Core has confidently entered the realm of one of my favourite series of all time – rewarding my effort with the same feelings of joy and revelation I experienced upon finally getting to grips with Dark Souls; the adoration I have of this series really is that profound. There is no game I am more hyped for than Fires of Rubicon.

As stated, it’s not nearly as simple as it should be to play these games, but if you are at all curious and are aware of the barriers you’ll have to overcome to do so - both technical and philosophical – then, especially when the industry has been so replete with game after game that just do absolutely nothing for me, there are few game franchises I could recommend diving into head first, moreso than Armoured Core.