Armored Core 6 – Complete Technical Review
Armoured core is unlikely to get close to the praise and adulation that Elden ring enjoyed last year, yet it deserves it. For me, it is one of the best and most engrossing games I have played this year and possibly for the last few, why?. No frills, no long drawn out cutscenes, no heavy tutorials filling the screen for the opening hours. It simply gets down to the business of being a game and never lets up, mission structured, skill based, tactical, clandestine action with mechs.
One of the main reasons It tickles my fancy so much is my age and passion for the old school shoot-em-ups that dominated arcades, my free time and then home computers during the 80s before fading away into the early 90s. The original Armored core on PS1 was also attempting this SHUMUP rebirth improved in AC6. Each mission is the next level, after the first you can choose from 2 most times, and you earn new weapons, upgrades, tuning and skills as you go. It is like a mix of R-type, Thunderforce, Forgotten Worlds, Xenon 2, Ranger-X and more in a modern casing. A variety of mission types, from Action filled levels with cannon fodder to get you pumped, hone your skills and build your confidence. Stealth recognisance of data, extreme corporate sabotage and many more. Each can change from the brief, search a base and Then a mid level boss pops up that put you back in your box, to the end of chapter ones that make you rethink your life choices, and loadout. It even uses huge monster mechs you have to stop, scale and destroy in a nod to level 3 of R-type and a few others that had multi-screen bosses. But it always feels like a modern, mech inspired old school shooter. And the feel of the game and story work because they are all carried with great voice acting only and not soured with clunky character models and animation, here less is most certainly more.
And the story and character arc is well delivered during combat, with army chatter and one of the best generals I have heard in a game with some great lines that would make Apone smile on his Cigar. The skill based action and tactics drive the play style but this is NOT Dark souls or Elden ring. Much simpler in all aspects but more enjoyable and engaging for it, as you can leave a mission and try another one if that is challenging or go back and earn an S rank on a previous mission to boost credits and get the next upgrade. The enemy types are varied and each can have strengths and weaknesses you have to learn and exploit, but they can do the same to you and the balance of generous checkpoints and load out changes when you die help reduce the frustration, just be sure to grab that part before you ship out as there are no shops out in battle so you can only swap with what you own, or a restart is needed. Intentional, and brilliant as it means you pay for your mistakes, and you learn that much faster for them. All the combat, movement, lock-on and control is exceptional aside some gripes where the game can ignore your input and being staggered once can be the end of you instantly, but this is the only element that is similar to dark souls, in that a single mistake can end your game. 95% it is fair and fine, but on occasion I did feel this can be overzealous on ignoring your repair click and sometimes dodge, but all is fair in love and war.
The Art of the Machine
From a graphical perspective it uses the same Elden Ring et al engine and is driven by incredibly muted yet imposing art design over technical chops, that said they do use many FX and features to amplify this. GPU particles are worthy of merit as they add so much to all your fire power, explosions, weather FX in level, snowflakes, fire embers billow out, smoke plumes from destroyed debris with sparks and trails. Electric shots, explosions and general contact makes great use of this and the impact it adds to the 2D billboard alpha fx convince as a huge walker is consumed in smoke and sand. Lighting is key with bright whites, burnt oranges, muted blues, blacks all adding atmosphere to each level and aligned with dense scenery and destruction, with trees, pylons, crates, water towers and more all being destructible alongside the enemy, and you aid the sense of realistic physics as you leave a wake of destruction any 80s action movie would be proud of. Mech flight also employs physics with weight affecting your take off and ariel control, again balancing the power of upgrades with the speed and it feels fair and accurate that you quickly adapt to it and can even use it in your favour.
Textures and detail is minimal, with some blurry elements even on PS5, SX and PC with the older generation really suffering at times on the visual front. You will rarely spend long enough looking at these to notice, aside the mech garage sections where the low mip-maps, even on the X1X stand out but the reason is related to the circa 18GB smaller install size these versions have over the 53GB current Gen and PC version, all being textures and BVH related. It still relies on SSAO and cascaded shadow maps and these 2 areas are also dynamic with them scaling up and down during action, which can be very obvious at times and they almost oscillate back into a stable position when this happens, I did note that Xbox consoles tend to have lower shadows than PlayStation, as here with the PS4 having better shadows than the X1X, which is odd and likely a bug. All versions look very close, aside the RT AO used in the Garage sections if enabled, a minor boost but not one that make a big difference and this is largely due to the very limited and repetitive sections it is used for. Had they created multiple level start sections it may have had a bigger impact or used them in the real time cinematics, which would be the best place for them in practice the FX cutbacks and resolution are the only changes you will notice and some more than others.
Old dog, old tricks
A cross generation game again, we start at the bottom with the PS4 and X1S. The gap, on a visual front, is big, AO is cut back on X1S, as is LoD slightly and Shadows are at the lowest with AA being almost off. IN addition to all this the game uses DRS and can scale from a high of 1600×900 to an often-found 1152×648 level, bringing it into Switch territory of output. This means between the 2 you do get significantly worse visual appearance and image stability is very poor, but the choices are the right ones as performance benefits from this, although it is not smooth. Up from here all comes down to resolution and refinement, PS4 scales from 1080 down to 900p In action but AA is better.
Next up we have PS4Pro which uses what looks to be a Checkerboard resolve to a fixed from all my counts 1800p output and looks very clean and benefits greatly from the boost in clarity, even if textures look no better due to the same assets contained within. Rounding out the last gen is the X1X which boosts the highest 3840×2160 resolution which again uses DRS but from counts seems to stay at or close to 1512 level most of the time. The PRO is a little sharper than the X1X zoomed in, but the textures are not, and shadows are worse on the 1X so in reality they trade blows on that score. Then we have the SS which is below them both with its quality mode a fixed 1440p and its performance mode drops down to 1080p but does target 1440p via DRS it almost never hits that in this mode though. However, textures are better, and shadows are now as good as the pro in quality mode, but FX scale lower in performance mode.
Current generation consoles are very close, Series S is first with some minor reductions on Shadows, AO, AA and LOD over the PS5 and SX Quality mode. As noted, Frame rate mode engages DRS with it more often being 1080p. And like the bigger consoles no matter which mode you play on the Cutscenes run in Quality mode and are fixed at the highest pixel counts of 1440. PS5 and SX hit 4K from all my counts in Quality mode and have the highest visual settings, matching PC max from some baseline checks. And frame rate mode turns on DRS with 2160 to 1512p range on PS5 and a 2160to 1512p range on SX, as is always the case this could scale higher and lower. IN addition, the dynamic Effects ramp up here with shadows and AO and even AA reducing when in motion it seems but they can remain that way on SX so it may still be a bug on that console. But in general play you would likely not see any of this and even the PS4 to X1S during combat can fade away all versions look impressive in motion as this is what games are designed to be, and from a visuals perspective that gap is the single biggest over all other here within the same generation, hardware range.
Performance
It is here that we see the biggest deltas across the platforms and generations, last gen first and base consoles both target 30fps and even though they do run at the frame rate often, it reinforces why I focus on frame times. As both can have bad frame delivery causing judder and in heavier sections drop frame also. This means expect a game that at times can feel ok and in others can feel like it is dropping frames or skipping as it often if during combat. That said the averages show the engine uses all the dynamic elements and limited memory these consoles now must stay as close to 30 new frames every second, just do not expect them too always be inline. PS4 is slightly better than the X1, but outside of a frame analysis like this they both feel close to expectations of a From Soft title running on 10+ year old hardware, although none of the games impactful action and engaging gameplay is lost, just muted a little.
X1X and Pro both target 60fps but this is not never hit in my tests with the low 40s being the best seen here, that said the choice is better as it means the frame times stay close to 33 and 16ms which means both consoles do feel better than the weaker siblings and although they never feel anything like 60fps, they at least play and perform closer to 30fps which is a noticeable boost over the 1 and 4 machines. These versions also present a further text of the current gen machines we will get to later. The visual increases are welcome as the game’s fine details and faster frame times do help these 2 versions to look very close, aside texture details and AO, to the current gen.
Talking of that Series S is next and here we see almost the same performance levels to the 1X and pro in its quality mode. Although it runs at a lower resolution of 1440 the textures, AO and LoD are slightly better with the increase mips being the most obvious. It also runs the RT AO in this mode but as noted it is so limited, in this build at least, that it never makes much of a difference. As you can see in the comparisons though, the Frame-Rate mode benefits from 44% reduction in pixel counts and shadow cascade and Ao reductions. Meaning it now reaches closer to that hallowed 60fps, sadly in all action it still falls some way short of that goal. It is by far the best so far but in some of the heavier missions it can drop to 30fps ranges and thus it can still not achieve a consistent performance level. In Side by Sides we can see that almost 80% improvement at times and across an average run of play we see a 41% increase showing that the pixel count does help greatly on the targets and it may be bandwidth bound still at 1080 which can cause some of the closer fps readout sections, but the performance boost is tangible without any fps graph required.
PC
Quality mode on the big consoles is a match for the best on PC and runs at the same native 4k resolution, which is worth noting the PC version is one of the best day one PC ports From have delivered to date. DX12 based, no shader compilation stutter and not even a pre-compile pop-up when starting was noted. It either creates them A-Sync during play or does it in the background within the first boot and subsequent loading sections, A* here. The menu mirrors Elden ring with a main Low/medium/high/max and then subsets within this, but the best bet here is to set to maximum and then scale Resolution outputs to hit 60fps. Or target AO and Shadows for GPU savings and LOD for CPU ones, but generally even a modest desktop CPU of the past 8 years should be good for 60fps here. As I covered in my IGN review a few weeks back the Steam Deck runs this great at 720P, Medium/Low settings at a 30fps or even 40fps target and I stand by that recommendation still. Using my mid-range RTX2070 with an OC which can be used as a proxy 3060/4060 level of performance expectations. Then 4K max is largely a 30-40s output performance rate and can even dip below at points, meaning I would recommended the DRS option however on PC or at least my RTX card DRS works for effects but not resolution, meaning you have to pick a lower base output and no DLSS or FSR2 does leave you with native options. I found 1620p High settings delivers an almost locked 60fps readout, compared to the matched quality settings of SX and PS5 in this mission PC does very well here. Being only 9.5 and 13% respectively slower than PS5 and Series X, a pretty close result indeed. The FPS mode cannot be compared as DRS works on consoles, however From Soft do not target high optimised titles and the results here across console and PC are some of their best. Running at the fixed 1620p output, approx. 40% reduction on 4K, still looks good and now 60fps is a reality, with my old 2700x not impacting this target. That said the game is still single or dual thread bound and although 120fps is possible on this machine at 1080 High, the CPU can still cause it to dip into the low 60s in heavier machines along with bandwidth demands that can affect all machines in heaver alpha. CPU wise my ageing 8c 2700x is more than good enough to hit 60fps+ and this is a game that will be GPU bound on most machines, above the Steam Deck Speck at least and it runs across lower end hardware such as the RX480 or GTX970 levels with no issues at 1080p 60fpsish rates, reinforcing this is a cross gen game through and through and as much fun on PC as consoles with great Mouse and Keyboard support right (fresh out of the package) the box.
PlayStation5 vs Xbox Series X
The big boys have 2 modes, with Quality though the performance is pretty variable and although it is better than both Pro, X1X at higher res and settings and better than my RTX2070 PC at the same settings i.e. Maximum it never comes close to being a 60fps game and would even struggle on VRR screens as it can too often dip into the low 40s and even high 30s. The boost to IQ is welcome in certain sections however, due to the fact the real time cutscenes run in this mode, the choice I always prefer to boost fidelity, this mode is only for those that want the cleanest and sharpest image at all times at the cost of performance. I am thankful we have now seen such a long run and wide selection of games that offer dual modes on these consoles, and it still continues 3 years into it. AND IF FROM SOFTWARE are now joining that group with not one but 2 titles, I think a corner has been turned in this aspect and with the best PC version they have ever delivered, I am grateful we have this mode even if it offers nothing more than a perfect BC mode for a console yet to come…maybe.
Thankfully the second of the modes does a much better job and the sacrifices are largely invisible to most as covered in the res and FX. Now we see 60fps often hit on both machine and the opening level could see some dips into the low 50s which remained within the VRR window but still felt good without one, as I covered in my IGN review. But I have since tested more demanding levels across all that use long draw distance, high gematric load, heavy use of GPU particles, characters and alpha Effects. And here I can stress both machines, as you have seen already with the prior consoles and PC. Here we can see in the opening mission the PS5 gains a small advantage over the SX, sometimes it can be 5-8% faster on PS5 and on other mission the advantage flips to Series X with similar levels. Unlike Quality mode, which aside cutscenes fall within margin of error, in Framerate mode I am not convinced that some of it is not CPU issues at points and others bandwidth or pure compute related. The base engine is still designed for last gen machines and PC so the port and compilation to current generation may not be the most effective. Over a selection of missions to vary the runs and aligning them both as best I can, we see the PS5 win by 1% and on the Snow mission the Series win by 2.6%, meaning we are well within margin of error territory here, using the Wall mission, another stress point, we do see the SX take some small wins in heavy section during the mission but it ends with less than 1% between them, meaning we have an almost perfect match which is invisible outside of the FPS test here.
Backwards compatibility
Is all hope lost then unless, aside PC power and scaling, to get a locked 60fps. Not, step forward the continued unsung hero (not me) of these consoles BC. With PlayStation’s BC method really highlighting its strengths here and Xbox has gotten worse. The first thing is the performance, well as you have seen the SX in its forced BC mode is marginally better than the X1X due to the fact it now seems to lock the res to 4K rather than scale, whereas the X1X is often 1512p. So, the extra GPU power is being spent on more pixels at a lower frequency. As such the BC mode here is worse than both current modes. Compounding this though is for me to get this to work I had to force the SX offline and use the Disc copy. You could still copy your install from the X1 or 1X and do this also, but then it would need to be primary console etc to enable offline digital games and you need the old console as you cannot download the last gen Xbox versions on SS or SX, effectively locking all digital players out of that choice, this is a not good and I think a shame. Far from a major problem but certainly one that negates the good work then did with BC at the midpoint of last gen.
PS5 is simple, you can use the disc pS4 game and play that in Pro mode OR choice to download the PS5 or PS4 version, which you can do on any game that supports cross gen versions or you own the PS4 version. Once done you can play and even update that version as and when, something you cannot do on Xbox because as soon as you go online it will force you to update to the SX/SS version. That out of the way we can see that the stress points on PS5 which could see high 30s albeit briefly in these heavy sections are now almost a locked 60. Aside a handful of dropped.
Summary
I have been a fan of Fromsoft since they started the Kings Field series in 1996 (In Europe at least) on the PS1. As a fan of RPG titles prior in Dungeon Master, Ultima and more it pulled me in. But Armored core in 97 was the one that hooked me, and I think reflected how varied their style was. Over the years they have grown and Demon Souls, Dark Souls and Blolodborne have all been an evolution on a theme. IN AC6 I think they have perfected the modern-day Shoot-em-up in 3D they were aiming for in 97. The accessibility and simplicity of playing in chunks when you no longer have thew time or willpower to play for hours on end, this grabs me even more than those titles. It balances the challenge perfectly and gets progressively harder but never feels unfair. The tactics and timing are as vital as the skills it asks of you, and it has been my most returned to game this year when I have had spare time to kill, even if just 30 minutes. The Audio quality is exceptional with a superb sound mix and slightly 80s action move hammy dialogue, but it works. Music is not overpowering but balances great synth tunes and deep analogue sounding keys in many levels that completes that 80s futuristic tone it is aiming for.
Visually it is not a stunner, but it is artistically strong, as all FS titles are, and they really know how to create atmosphere, impact and style without using expensive technology. The fact the game runs well on such a range of hardware is a highlight, even if it never gets close to a perfect performance rate aside your own PC spec and settings or, like Elden ring before the PS5 BC mode of the Pro, which is nigh on perfect. Showing that the possibility is present for all current generation owners (yes, even the Series S) to have a locked 60fps mode with cutbacks even if it is simply the BC mode as a native option within the game. From will never go back and add this a choice and as such only the excellent and open BC modes available on the PS5 provide PlayStation owners the choice to get the best performing mode on consoles. The PC version is also a revelation in comparison to Dark Souls and others, DLSS or FSR2 choices would be welcome along with a bigger choice in menus, but this would be more work for the engine team and would likely not make much of an impact on the audience or sales. I do hope this game appears in more lists of the best games of 2023 as for me, I rate it higher than Elden Ring last year, which I loved. Armored Core 6 is a flaming scorcher for me.