Recent reviews by Robin

Really fun game. Good combination of Rogue-lite and rogue-like elements. Playthroughs are about an hour long and have a good mix of being able to decide which way you want to build and adapting to what you get. You're fairly flexible, which makes getting items drops interesting, as that can allow to pivot a bit one way or the other if you decide to do so. On the other hand there are enough small restrictions that require planning around that you can't just do whatever and get away with it.

For fans of short games that have some depth to play around with, I can fully recommend this game!

Edit: Patch kinda ruined the game for me, games take way too long now (over an hour) and it's mostly military focused (with military being the weakest part of the game already and doesn't feel fleshed out) Also as a result there's some problems where, even though the game is turn based, there are situations where clicking faster than your opponent makes plays possible or not because it instantly influences who owns what tiles and that can change what you can do or not)

In general, military in a FFA game doesn't work well since it's at best zero sum, but usually even worse than that with both the attacking and defending player just wasting resources for no gains. But even worse if one players gets attacked from multiple sides for instance. And currently the only reason to build military is for trying to take over another players stuff, so it not only makes the games worse in terms of it dragging players down, but also makes games take longer since no one is making points (or a lot fewer). Until one side maybe takes over and then instantly wins with 50 point difference cause they could take that one city that had all the points or so. Idk. Either way it's too all in, feels too bad and doesn't work well in an FFA setting. Aside from also the whole surprise attack thing where untis get built out of nowhere and then already attack without anyone seeing any warning signs

This is an amazing game. Fantastic combination of deck builder and civilization gameplay bundled in a short playtime that makes jumping into games very fast and fun.
I was almost put off checking this one out because of a single huge negative review that claims the game is all about military and there's too much RNG.
Luckily neither is really the case, however I can see how if you're missing some understanding of mechanics it can seem that way perhaps (i.e. it's more a skill issue than anything else).
Also thankfuly there's a wiki that has all the detailed info, which is very much needed, since there's a lot more depth to the mechanics than the simple tutorial will make seem.

All in all I'm having a blast with the game since I picked it up a couple days ago, would recommend to anyone who's enjoying fastish (30-40 minutes) games and enjoys deckbuilders

As a kid I used to love Mega Man games, so I thought I'd give this a try, but after playing two levels I decided to refund. Lots of gotcha mechanics where you most likely have to fail first and die because there's no way you have the reaction/foresight to deal with the situation directly and there's no telegraph. Also found enemies a mix between pushover and really annoying but none that provided a good or fun challenge (actually the two bosses I fought were kinda fun though, so I'm talking about enemies in levels here).
Movement with the hookshot also feels kinda clunky and in general the extra move set you have doesn't feel that great to use so far.
I think what made the old school games so good to play was a straight forward move set that was highly responsive to player input combined with difficult levels, but designed in such a way to work well with that simpler moveset. This felt more like trying to add more stuff but then failing at making it interesting or engaging at all

It's a shame, overall this game has a lot of good stuff going for itself. But also so many dumb frustrating things it's really not worth the time and money. I think the devs just decided they want to make a "hard" game and that the players should die a lot and didn't really think about HOW they implement difficulty.

So the result is that this game has a lot of arbitrary gotcha moments like floor falling away beneath you or ambushes to make you go through a level again. And the bosses are almost all purposefully badly animated.
This can make thematic sense for puppet bosses (and it works sorta well there), however for human or non-mechanical bosses this just means all the animations feels off for no reason other than to mess with player dodge/block inputs.
In essence this turn the game from an action game to a rhythm/memory game, since no animation means anything in terms of signaling the attack, it's just an arbitrary wind up with an arbitrary hit timing. The same enemy can delay a similar looking attack for 2 seconds or it can come out almost instantly. So all that's left is memorizing and find a why to count/intuit the timing. This is to the stark contrast of games like Dark Souls 3 or Sekiro where enemy animations actually feel natural and smooth and make sense and as a result you can just OBSERVE the enemy movement instead of memorizing strict timings.
Also while 2 stage boss fights can be a cool challenge sometimes, LoP does this literally every time and it gets old quickly. Meaning instead of fighting one boss you're really fighting two different bosses back to back as the moveset barely overlaps usually. So again it seems the sole focus was on "make players die a lot" instead of "how can we make this a fun challenge", which frankly is so lazy and easy to do it's barely worth making a game around that idea

So the first 5-7 hours or so were fantastic for sure. Atmosphere is great, combat is not bad ("not bad" being the best it'll ever get ) and you figure out game mechanics through clever use of finding manual pages and part of the game is puzzling out how things work. All of this, when it works comes together well and feels great.
However when it fails it fails also really hard and all the fun goes out the window pretty fast. There's multiple ways the game can do that.
One is to simply be stuck on not figuring out where to go. Thankfully this didn't happen a lot to me and usually I could find my way to looking over the "map" again and deciding that "there is probably something here, so let's check that section out again". But generally almost all access points are hidden by the perspective of the camera. Be that hidden ladders or corridors or whatnot. I get the throwback to older games where some secrets where hidden that way, but it's way, wayyy overdone here by being basically the default way of going from section to section at times. This also makes it more annoying to remember which way you needed to go when going through an area later.
Another really bad aspect is the combat. At first it's not too bad, since both you and the enemies seem equally clunky. But in the second half of the game enemies are mostly a keep away AI that runs away from you and then attacks from long range. And for some enemies it takes you longer to swing and hit with your weapon after they just attacked you than it takes the enemies to run away from you again. Some also get invulnerability frames just after their attack so you're guaranteed not able to hit them. Basically, most basic enemies become a huge pain in the ass while adding nothing interesting to combat.
Similar for bosses. except bosses have the extra problem that for some the camera moves too fast (as it's always on the boss) so aside from that one boss where during a specific sequence all it does is circle around you (and thus move the camera, which made me dizzy as heck after a while) you often get problems of the boss attacking while moving fast that leads to not quite seeing what's going on or inputs not working, or blocking not working cause your character turns too fast (or not fast enough, idk). which means sometimes you block sometimes you don't which is also quite frustrating. Aside from the same keep away/i-frame stuff on top, which just drags out the already not so fun battles too much.
Then the secret puzzles. I'd say I can see how some people can get really into those. And good for you, I hope you had a lot of fun with hose, but unless you enjoy staring at cryptic messages and just trying stuff out a lot and never getting clear feedback it's seems a bit too much trial and error. I even had it happened that I actually correctly figured out what to do, but then it didn't work anyway, so I assumed I needed maybe a certain item first, but as it turns out I did everything correctly already, it just didn't work as intended (for whatever reason), so that kinda sucked big time.
Some puzzles/clues are incredibly vague at times and some seemingly require you to translate that whole fake language to even get the clues. So if you enjoy that kinda stuff, that's probably a plus, but I just thought the game had its head up wayy too far it's own arse at that point tbh.

Nice, fun game. Haven't dived into the harder difficulties yet, but definitely tempting to try that out at some point. Challenges are also interesting and make you go out of your comfort zone a bit in terms of using different units and combinations, which is great. Gameplay itself works really well, being a good mix of base building, upgrading and tactical battles.

Got a bug where an hour of progress was lost and didn't save. On some of the most difficult missions. Not gonna recommend it, since that's such a huge flaw and an embarrassment to release in such a state

Ok full review now after finishing the game (meaning going through it 3 consecutive times to get all the endings). Even despite the bug where you lose progression, I would not quite recommend this game. This is also the first fromsoft title that I'm not gonna play again for a long time, since nothing really draws me back to it. In comparison, I played all the other fromsoft games multiple times and some I'm still enjoying regularly to this day.
Armored core isn't a bad game and it has some really good moments too. Some great boss fights, some very memorable scenes and scenery. It creates a good atmosphere and the story isn't that bad either. So why not recommendation?
Partly because a good chunk of the game is also not very memorable in some ways. A lot of fights and sorta-bosses aren't very interesting and some stuff is downright annoying to deal with.
Let's get a bit into details though.

At it's core the game is about making a mech almost more so than piloting it. You are very free to buy and sell parts (at original price) so you're never locked out of experimenting with your current iteration. not only that but you have save slots to save a build, so you can just load/switch builds with a couple button presses. Even during a mission (if you fail and retry from checkpoint) you can swap or even try out different parts.
As someone coming from Souls games and having never played any Armored Core I didn't quite realise that and it caused some early frustration. I had the assumption you just get to pick a style of play and stick with it, but it was soon very clear that doesn't always work. Sometimes you need more mobility, other times, more firepower, or a specific way of attacking/pressuring enemies. All that can be quite fun to figure out and experiment and I'm sure people will do a lot of experimenting trying to get S ranks.
There's still fights where you need to learn to dodge of course. Learn enemy attack patterns etc. And some of those fights are really well done. The usual fromsoft difficulty curve going from "how the heck am I ever beating THAT" to "oh, right I slowly see how to dodge that crazy move and where the window for damage is". Those are the parts that are often fromsofts greatest strength in games and here there's also some fights where this shines through and leads to great gameplay experiences.

The problem is in all those parts where it fails. This is mostly (but not exclusively) fights with multiple other mechs/mini-bosses where it's difficult if not impossible to see what both (or three) of them are doing all the time, so you will just randomly get hit from offscreen. This wouldn't be the biggest issue, if it weren't for the stagger mechanic that is also in the game. Take enough damage and you'll be stunned for 2-3 seconds, during which you can do nothing and just stand there. This is usually where most if not all of your health goes away very quickly. And when it happens from offscreen it's even more frustrating. A lot of the difficulty from the NG+(+) playthroughs comes from new fights that pit you against multiple enemies at once and it's a not a fun way of scaling difficulty, since you can't really handle it very well in terms of seeing what even goes on. At times all you hear is a consecutive warning beeps telling you you need to dodge something, but if you hear that once a second it loses all meaning (plus you still don't know which direction to dodge anyway). The solution is basically rush down one enemy as fast as you can and hope you don't take too much damage. OR go really far away (assuming the arena allows it) and just chip away. Neither option is very satisfying gameplay though.
Another thing is that a lot of elite fights are against other mechs. And those fights aren't that interesting. It's literally just another AC with weapons like you could equip yourself that flies around and attacks and most importantly dodges everything it can basically dodge and that's kinda it. Imagine Dark Souls but 75% of "bosses" are other AI Hollowed with an arbitrary PvP build.
Another unfortunate problem is the camera. Even against bigger enemies, your AC often takes up 40-60% of the screen (and also mostly the MIDDLE of the screen). If the enemy moves a certain way (and they move a lot)it's not uncommon that your mech completely blocks out the the enemy. Which means you can just attack and you can't see it coming. Which, given how quickly you can die, is a huge issue. Camera has often occasionally been problematic on Fromsoft games, but almost never when you were in the open. This is probably the first game, where you can fight in a giant completely open arena and still not see what the enemy is doing, be that through your mech blocking the view, or through the enemy moving so fast by you the camera can't quite catch up sometimes.

As a result of those two things a lot of fights in the NG+(and NG++) playthroughs don't really feel that fun. There's too many fights where you get ganged up on by multiple enemies in a way that makes seeing what's going on almost impossible. Also too many fights where avoiding damage is almost (if not actually) impossible. Like any fast enemy mech with a shotgun will just take potshots at you until you're stunned and then get some good damage in on you. You can't really avoid that, because if you try to quick boost out of the way all that happens is that any of the other 3 weapons that same mech has will hit you instead and usually you safe your QB to avoid high damaging attacks not small spreads. This is a bit of a minor gripe though. Just another small thing on the list of why a lot of the fights just aren't that fun.

And I think that kinda sums it up. Despite some really great highs. Overall it's just not that fun most of the time. It's not that difficult either (seeing how quickly I beat it), but there's also nothing that makes me want to come back to it (in contrast to say a game like Sekiro that I played through maybe 10 times by now or more, because the game is just that much fun to simply play)

This game could be really fun, but at this point the UI and lacking QoL not only hold this back, but basically dragged it into a dark alley and stabbed it a couple times.

Generally, this game has devolved into clicking a thousand things twice to check aspects and that's kinda it. The more rooms you have the more cluttered everything becomes. In Cultist you had a giant table and could just sort cards yourself and that worked really well.
Here there's limitations and also since it's a mix of cards and graphics it gets very difficult to figure out what aspects stuff has without clicking on everything, as I can't just sort all objects belonging to, say, sky in a giant pile for my convenience.

As a result the longer I play the less fun I have, despite unlocking cool new stuff to play around with. Except the cool new stuff is also just finding x-type object with y-type aspect and make a thing to help with lessons. The gameplay loop would be fine, but the part where it's impossible to see what stuff goes together without clicking on all the things and no way to really sort stuff gets tiring very fast.

Once you have 15+ rooms, with 30+ objects and 50+ books everywhere, the whole finding the right thing (9 aspects now btw) to help you do the stuff you want becomes a chore.

Will definitely recommend this once those (imo) very basic issues are fixed, but otherwise I'd say stay away. Yes, the first couple hours are fun and interesting, but it won't really stay that way, eventually it's just overwhelmingly cluttered unless you burn everything you don't think you need anymore (book burning as a librarian, hell yeah, +1 for flavour eh? :) ) and that just brings the fun down to a halt very quickly

It starts out really well, ropes you in with great flavour and nostalgia, but after a relatively short while it's clear the gameplay is mostly chaotic and doesn't work very well at all. Enemies stack on top of themselves, so you can't see how many there are, they randomly shoot from almost off screen so you get randomly hit, stuff just explodes, falls down, explodes some more, so you just randomly die. I mean I see what they were going for, having a small physics engine adds to the world and allows for cool interactions (when it works). But all in all, the game becomes really boring and frustrating after a short while, since all you do is retry the same level or short stretch over and over and get slightly different RNG so sometimes stuff explodes just the right way to help instead of randomly kill you, or you get just the right Bro (character, which you'll get at random) to deal with a situation well. Mostly it's just you do stuff, things explode, you don't see what's going on, you die and sometimes not and keep playing and, if you take out all the nostalgia flavour that's pretty much the game. If it didn't have the nostalgia, no one would play this or recommend it, I'm sure

It's an interesting game. Very fun if it flows well and incredibly frustrating when the camera and control input issues ruin your experience. For the price I definitely would not recommend it in it's current state. Like it's cool and all that it looks very martial artsy and the style is great, but if your inputs don't work or the camera messes you up that's some basic gameplay issues that mere style doesn't overcome in the end.
For reference, I beat the game and the alternate ending at the time of writing this review so don't come at me with "git gud"