The original Armored Core was the game that taught me to fight in the air. Even as I struggle to remember what I had for breakfast this morning, I still have vivid memories of boosting around its squalid industrial plains and catacombs, dipping carefully into my AC’s replenishing energy reserve, while combing the cathode-ray TV murk for the hiss and flash of incoming projectiles. I loved jetpack duels and accessorised my mechs to suit, favouring springy reverse-jointed legs, compact laser pistols and featherweight torso components with just the faintest dusting of armour.
26 years later, Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon sends me hurtling out of a cargo catapult and skipping over the surface of a desolate, mountainous planet, its sky filled with vast, suspended mining facilities, its valleys with trashed cities and pleasantly brittle forests. I never could have imagined this kind of spectacle, playing the PS1 game, but the game beneath is broadly the same balance of intricate customisation and hectic robo combat. It’s shaping up to be a stonking heavy metal escapade, though I do have reservations about a few of the components.
In Fires of Rubicon you play an amnesiac pilot with the codename 621, who works for a mysterious, gravel-voiced man named Walter. Your stated story objective is to rediscover your past and rebuild your reputation, but what you’re really here to do, natch, is bolt together the fanciest, deadliest and/or silliest battlebot you can muster, picking from a gorgeous selection of legs, torsos, arms, heads, weapons and internal systems that dramatically affect how your AC performs.
