Armored Core 6 players are already completing wild challenges, from deathless runs to using no weapons

A four legged mech fires plasma from an aerial vantage point
(Image credit: FromSoftware)

Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon has been out for four days, and in that incredibly short period of time, players have already completed the game in a multitude of challenging ways, as if the base content wasn’t tricky enough.

On release day, many gamers quickly found themselves stumped by the very first boss, although this level of difficulty probably didn’t come as a surprise for series veterans and FromSoftware fans. While many were busy getting to grips with Armored Core 6’s mechanics, though, others were out there blasting every foe to bits with their fists alone, and some were focusing on completing the entire game without dying, all while doing it as fast as possible. 

As Eurogamer reports, what appears to be Armored Core 6’s very first complete ‘no weapons’ challenge was done by YouTube creator ZeroLenny. Since the game requires you to be able to fight your enemies in some way, if you load into a mission without any weapons at all, you’ll find that your mech will simply attack by delivering punches, instead (this also happens if you run out of ammo). As you’d expect, this is by no means the strongest or most efficient way of plowing through enemies, and it obviously meant that ZeroLenny had no way to attack foes from a distance, but even so, that didn’t stop the creator from finishing the job.

Meanwhile, YouTuber Niko Bellic has already finished a no-death speedrun in under three hours. Over on HowLongToBeat, the current average time to beat Armored Core 6’s main story is 15 hours, which really puts into perspective how impressive it is to complete it in less than a fifth of that time, especially without dying once. At the time of writing, the game hasn’t been out long enough for Speedrun.com to accept runs, so it’s not currently clear what the world record speedrun is, but there's no doubt that this will be a strong contender.

Allow me to reiterate that, again, the latest Armored Core title has been out in the hands of players for less than a week, so to see such feats being pulled off already is stunning - chances are that we’re only going to see more as time goes on.  

If you’re looking for even more to play, be sure to check out our lists of the best PS5 games and best Xbox Series X games. 

Catherine Lewis
News Writer, TechRadar Gaming

Catherine is a News Writer for TechRadar Gaming. Armed with a journalism degree from The University of Sheffield, she was sucked into the games media industry after spending far too much time on her university newspaper writing about Pokémon and cool indie games, and realising that was a very cool job, actually. She previously spent 19 months working at GAMINGbible as a full-time journalist. She loves all things Nintendo, and will never stop talking about Xenoblade Chronicles.