Highlights
- After a decade-long absence, Armored Core is set to make its return with the upcoming release of Armored Core 6, and the media response has been extremely positive.
- Reviewers of previous Armored Core games often criticized the series for being inaccessible and difficult, but now the same difficulty is celebrated and seen as a breath of fresh air in the gaming industry.
- Armored Core has always believed in players' abilities and never compromised its core experience, even when faced with calls for the series to be simplified. The franchise's obtuse complexity is seemingly now more appreciated.
The main man of Mecha is back, baby. After being absent for a decade, Armored Core is finally set to make its return. As of the writing of this article, we are a little over two weeks away from Armored Core 6’s launch. As the release approaches, the media has been getting their hands on the game and the response has been extremely positive. Naturally, this has been hyping up my already hyped hype—creating a hypeception, if you will.
While I have never been a stalwart fan of the franchise, I’ve played most of the Armored Core games in one form or another, and I have always greatly enjoyed my time with them. There really isn’t a series out there like Armored Core: it is one of one. So, out of curiosity, and as a way to satiate my all-consuming excitement, I started pawing through old reviews for previous entries in the series. I was stunned to find that this celebrated mecha property wasn’t quite as celebrated as I had remembered. Sure, Armored Core has always had dedicated fans, but the critics were far more mixed; and considering how many titles in the series received scores in the 60s, the word ‘mixed’ is doing some pretty heavy lifting.
I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole, and read a ton of these reviews. Eventually, I started tracking the various complaints. And I have to say, it’s reassuring to see that bad takes have always existed in video game discourse. As an example, I encountered a handful of reviews criticizing the slow-moving and sluggish mechs in the series. I even saw an Armored Core 4 review make that claim. Which, if you have ever played a more dexterous build in that game, you will know is a very silly criticism. Using a lightweight, mobility-first mech in Armored Core 4 feels like trying to control a rogue shooting star.
But I’m not here to whinge about bad takes in decade-old reviews – well, not entirely, at least. What I found most interesting about these pieces is how clearly they demonstrate how gaming media’s views on what a game should be have changed. One recurring criticism I saw, again and again, was how inaccessible the Armored Core titles were. Many reviewers focused on how opaque the mechanics were, and how unrelentingly difficult the combat encounters could be. It wasn’t uncommon for reviewers to praise the games for being rich and satisfying, while simultaneously criticizing them for being too much for the average dum-dum to handle, and then giving the game a middling score as a direct result.
This sentiment was present from the beginning, but it became more prevalent as we entered the seventh generation (the PS360era) of Armored Cores. Which, honestly, makes a lot of sense. That was the generation of games that would drown players in tutorials and hold their hands so tightly that they cut off all circulation. The era when mechanically rich, nuanced games—and games that featured any difficulty whatsoever—were unceremoniously taken out back and shot.
Poetically, FromSoftware’s own Demon’s Souls is what snapped the entire industry out of that waking nightmare and reminded game developers that, yes, we would like to get a little pushback from our games on occasion. And you know what? It’s okay if we figure some things out on our own. In the modern era, the Souls style of game design is often heavily praised. ‘Finally, someone gets us!’ the media cries out. ‘At last, they are making the types of games we want to play!’, the gamers proclaim.
This, of course, brings us back to Armored Core, a series that never compromised its core experience. A series that believed in players, and knew that they were capable of being the mech pilots they had always dreamed of becoming. A franchise that realized that holding the player’s hand in the process, and dumbing down the core mechanics that lent those games a palpable sense of veracity, would have only served to cheapen the experience. A series that had always provided a stiff challenge, and it did so unapologetically. More to the point, a series that did the whole Souls thing decades before the first Souls title existed.
While the wildly positive previews for Armored Core 6 are aligned with those older reviewers in their praise of the mech customization, it is hard to not be stunned by how many people in the industry specifically celebrate the difficulty that once earned these titles scorn. The obtuse complexity is now a breath of fresh air, not an impossible hurdle for the normie smooth-brained gamer. And the cries for the series to be simplified and made more digestible? Well, they have completely disappeared. While I can’t say I know exactly what the ultimate critical reception will be for Armored Core 6, I suspect it will likely be overwhelmingly positive. It will probably be the best-reviewed Armored Core title by a large margin. And if that is indeed the case, then I think there is only one conclusion that we can come to…
Armored Core hasn’t changed. We have.