Conclusion

"Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon," developed by From Software, provides an immersive third-person perspective shooter experience. Players pilot customized giant robots, engage in resource wars, navigate tough boss fights, and refine their combat skills in a mecha-powered world. I'm sure a lot of people were hoping for "Dark Souls with robots," but Armored Core is quite different. No doubt, it has the complex boss fights and a rather high difficulty level, but overall I don't think it gets even close to masterpieces like Elden Ring or Dark Souls. For me, one of the most important aspects of these games is their open world, that's truly open and that has tons of things for you to discover. In AC6 you progress through missions that are often just several minutes long, and completely linear. It's a fun experience to customize your mech and learn what gadgets best suit your playstyle, but some boss fights are just SO much easier if you switch out the gear, which is something I rarely had to do in Elden Ring. I still don't like that your character is super clunky, difficult to move and runs out of stamina pretty quickly. Still, if you like the genre do check it out, the gameplay is solid and it's sitting at "Very Positive" on Steam, with 11,000 reviews, 82% of them are positive.

In terms of graphics the game looks very dated. While Elden Ring looks quite good, especially thanks to the intricate map design, levels in Armored Core VI feel lifeless and boring. The amount of geometry on world objects is terrible and terrain is mostly flat. This reminds me of graphics on the PlayStation 3, from 15 years ago. Textures are pretty low-res and smeared out. For some reason everything looks like it's rendered at sub-native resolution and upscaled. Not the HUD, that's super crispy, not your mech either, just the world environment. It's hard to describe, look for it in the screenshots. For example, cables and other diagonal high-contrast objects look extremely blocky, especially when they are far away. Turns out that From Software's "Depth of Field" effect is responsible for this look. For some reason, when enabled, it will make the rendered output blurry and look like it was rendered at lower resolution. Set depth of field to "off" and the image will be much sharper. Still, take a look at the screenshots with trees.. WTF ... it's 2023. Elden Ring looks MUCH better graphically.

The settings menu shows a ray tracing option, but unfortunately this is only active in the garage area. Actual gameplay does not support ray tracing. Very sad, especially considering that Elden Ring does support ray tracing. That feature was added in a fairly recent patch, so the game engine can support it. From Software has a long history of locking their titles at 60 FPS. Gamers rejoiced when they heard that Armored Cores VI supports up to 120 FPS. I spent a bit of time to patch out that 120 FPS cap, and the game runs perfectly fine without it, reaching around 200 FPS, at which point it becomes CPU limited. The surprising thing is that it still runs well, there's no issues with physics or anything. Looks like From Software just decided to keep an artificial FPS limit in-place, even though the game runs perfectly fine uncapped. Unlike Elden Ring I didn't notice any shader stuttering or similar problems, the game runs very smooth.

Hardware requirements of the game are quite light. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with highest settings you only need a RTX 3050 or RX 6600. Intel's Arc A750 even achieves 85 FPS, no problem at all. For fluid 1440p gaming at 60 FPS the minimum hardware is a RX 7600 XT, RTX 3060 or RTX 4060. Even 4K60 is in reach for a lot of cards. Anything faster than RX 6800 XT, RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 4070 will give you those 60 FPS. Generally, it seems that NVIDIA runs the game a little bit better than AMD. Intel works great, too, maybe because they are the only GPU vendor to have released game-ready drivers for the title. Intel is definitely on a run, beating the established chip makers with game support. No idea why NVIDIA and AMD are slacking so much recently.

VRAM requirements are fairly low. Just 5 GB at 1080p should be no problem for most cards. At 4K the VRAM usage is also quite light with just 6.3 GB. I wish there were options for better textures on cards with more VRAM. Changing the details settings generally doesn't do much for visual quality. No doubt, it looks different, but still, I'm not convinced that "Low" actually looks so much worse than "Maximum." Actually I like "Low" for its crispness. Still, the gameplay is solid, and it's not just about graphics.