Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is not a Soulslike. From the moment the game was announced there’s been, depending on your perspective, a concern, a hope or even an expectation, that the first new AC title in a decade would seek to emulate its critically and commercially acclaimed From Software stablemate. That’s absolutely not the case. There’s no intricately-designed interconnected levels here, no bonfire equivalents, no enemies that respawn when you rest.
In fact, AC6 is remarkably traditional in structure. While there are some branches in the narrative (three in my first play through, I believe) it’s a largely linear mission structure spread across five chapters. Sometimes there will be more than one mission on offer but, unless it’s one of the clearly marked decision points, they all need to be completed before progressing, it’s just a case of which one to tackle first. With the exception of the separate PvP multiplayer modes, which weren’t available at the time of review, the only distractions from the campaign are a 1v1 AI arena mode and the option to replay already completed missions.
The missions themselves tend to be quite short, with many of them lasting less than ten minutes, even for a cautious player. Checkpoints are generously positioned before bosses and tough encounters and it’s very rare that you’ll find yourself having to redo a tricky section multiple times.
