I’m not gonna jump the gun and act like I’m giving a ‘review’ of this so far, but I just got done playing the first handful of missions in Armored Core VI and I’m just. So. Happy. The movement feels perfectly weighty but responsive, they didn’t try to shoehorn a bunch of Soulsbornering elements into the format, it’s just a proper Armored Core after all this time! My biggest worry was that they would lose too much of the vibe of the older games, especially since V and VD (which I loved, don’t get me wrong) had such a focus on online play it kind of left the single player full of so-so missions and bullet sponge bosses. The build menu putting damage types front and center worried me a little bit since I didn’t care for the rock paper scissors damage typing, but damage types *were* always in the series with less emphasis. The new hook this time is a stagger bar, which according to friend of the site Sophie, is a Sekiro thing will take time to grow on me. I can see it becoming really annoying later on, but if it can be offset by better builds, I can’t bitch too much since a big part of the appeal to AC is when it beats you with a wooden stick and you go back to the garage to figure out the best way to hand out some anti-wood punishment. I’ll adore it if construction and adaptation go so far as to have you build around the terrain, but you seem to have a lot of airborne mobility so I kind of doubt it’ll go there. Still. Can dream.

A lot of the trailers going in had me comparing it to Daemon X Machina, at least visually. Flying robots, glowing red ‘magic rocks,’ but no, VI is definitely Armored Core.