New Armored Core 6 gameplay trailer shows off just what I've been waiting for: open areas, mech duels, and dumb bosses

On the heels of a story trailer that goes needlessly hard, Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon dropped a 12-minute gameplay preview this morning, and the upcoming mech action game is finally getting into the stuff I've been wanting to see since my hands-off preview last month.

The preview, streamed on YouTube by publisher Bandai Namco, opens with exactly what we've seen so much of already: a partially enclosed industrial environment. Fortunately, our mech hero quickly hops on a launch pad and yeets themselves into a forested mountain environment which is much more open than the levels shown in previous trailers and previews. 

The second they land in this mountain biome, the player starts tearing through enemy mechs out on patrol. A good old-fashioned vista gives us a chance to drink in the more sprawling environment design, with points of interest scattered across the wreckage of a factory. 

The speed and mobility of Armored Core 6's playable mechs makes even these distances easy to cover, but the sense of scope and freedom in this area is much grander compared to previous previews. I look forward to finding the optimal rooftops, silos, and tankers to stand on in order to ambush scattered enemy mechs. I'm also into the "vertical catapults" you can use to reach high-up stages, bringing more extreme verticality to levels. 

The footage quickly cuts to a boss fight with what looks like an armed dropship, and I'm struggling to believe my eyes because it actually looks fun. This may be the Destiny 2 player in me, but plugging away at dropships usually sounds about as fun as chopping a tree down using only a tablespoon. Flexing its Sekiro DNA, Armored Core 6 lets you stagger the ship with a laser katana, which definitely helps. 

Mech customization back in the garage looks engrossingly detailed as always, but to me the high point of this footage comes in right at the end. First of all, we hunt a huge walking mech called a Strider on account of it having a "giant laser cannon" mounted above its equally enormous buzz saws. This big, dumb, glorious thing looks like the kind of mech I'd make out of Legos as a kid, so I'm down for whatever it is these enemy engineers are on about. 

There's a brief shot of the player assaulting a base with help from some ally mechs, and then it's straight into a duel with an enemy pilot named Sulia. Most of the Armored Core 6 bosses, including the aforementioned Strider, have been lumbering mammoths, so it's exciting to see one of the faster dogfights front-and-center. 

Our pilots exchange trash talk and missiles before a fairly anticlimactic finish – before the calm is swiftly shattered by the appearance of a proper boss which I'm calling Mr. Missiles even though it's actually called AAP07: Balteus. This is FromSoftware back on its bullshit down to every last nut and bolt, and it can't come soon enough. 

Check out our hands-on Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon preview for our early impressions.