Rubicon 3, the setting for Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, is a far cry from the likes of Lordran and The Lands Between, immediately establishing a striking sci-fi aesthetic that's unlike anything From Software has created in the past decade. Lessons learned from the studio's most recent output are evident in Armored Core VI, but don't go in expecting this to be Dark Souls with mechs. The sixth numbered entry in the series is a decidedly Armored Core game, meshing exciting mech-on-mech action with the highly customizable assembly of your giant robot. It's a game for the die-hards but also represents the most approachable game in the series thus far--one that sees From Software return to its roots in triumphant fashion.

Though Rubicon 3 might be able to sustain human life, it's still an incredibly hostile place. Occupying corporations wage war against each other, local resistance fighters, and a governmental space force, for control of the planet and its valuable resources. Dilapidated cities, arid deserts, and frozen wastelands serve as the battlefields for mechanized warfare, as missiles, bullets, and laser cannons frequently collide with steel. Even the planet itself is imposing. Giant metallic structures stretch thousands of feet into the sky and then spread outwards like branches, each one carpeted in blinking lights that replace the stars they're obscuring. When you do catch a glimpse of the sky, you'll notice pockets of the planet's atmosphere burning red like fire.

The reason Rubicon 3 is such a hotbed of action is because it's home to Coral. This mysterious substance is immensely valuable, causing a number of extraplanetary corporations to descend upon the planet in an all-out war to harness it. You enter the fray as an independent mercenary employed by the enigmatic Handler Walter, who orders you to complete jobs on behalf of whichever faction is willing to pay. Referred to only as 621 or your callsign, Raven, the story in Armored Core VI has an oddly impersonal feel. Much of the narrative is delivered through audio on a static screen, with nary a human face in sight. Being a silent protagonist also makes it difficult to escape the feeling that you're a puppet for those pulling the strings. This is seemingly intentional, although the story never quite delves deep enough into this feeling of detachment to say anything meaningful. Most of the characters are fairly cliched, even if the voice acting is generally entertaining, and while there are interesting aspects to the lore, the story is ultimately disappointing without ever being particularly bad.

Put a few humans in outer space for a story set in the future and the result always seems to be that nothing will go their way. That's once again the broad strokes of this latest space thriller, Fort Solis, but the intrigue, as ever, is in the details. Developer Fallen Leaf does a good job of hiding the satisfying answers to its central mysteries up to the very end, which makes its story consistently absorbing even as some of its gameplay elements betray its own Hollywood-inspired intentions.

Fort Solis is a third-person adventure game that tells a story reminiscent of Moon and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's slow, sometimes to a fault, and more concerned with its message and themes than action set-pieces. That doesn't mean it's a low-stakes tale. On the contrary, the secrets tucked away in Fort Solis are existential, but it's expressed through the eyes of a small cast of interesting characters whom you'll get to know over the game's five-hour story.

Fort Solis has AAA aspirations, and it shows quite clearly in a few ways. For one, the game looks gorgeous. Built in Unreal Engine and presenting gameplay in an over-the-shoulder style, it would be easy to mistake this indie for the next big-budget cinematic thriller. That's further solidified by its exceptional cast headlined by Roger Clark and Troy Baker, but the complete cast of about 10 or so people is just as well-written and with great performances to match. Clark's Leary and Julia Brown's Jessica Appleton do well to color in the world in the first hour, including their own characters who would otherwise be amorphous Mars transplants in drab uniforms.

At first, Immortals of Aveum pleasantly surprised me, putting a lot more stock into its narrative themes of environmentalism than I expected its wartime story to cover. The focus for this first-person shooter, however, is still on blasting baddies, albeit with a variety of bullet-inspired spells instead of traditional firearms. And although all the shooting is exciting for the first half of the game, it becomes increasingly annoying in the latter half when firefights get longer and more frequent. These shoot-outs interrupt the story's momentum by dragging it out, curating an irritating sense of repetitive tedium.

Though you're slinging spells in Immortals, the magic you're casting is more cosmetic flavoring to what is otherwise a fairly traditional military shooter. Red magic unleashes with all the concussive force of a shotgun while green magic slowly ramps with the heated ferocity of a light machine gun and blue magic slices through the air with the precision of a bolt-action rifle. You switch between them at the push of the button, though annoyingly only in a cycle of blue to red to green and back to blue. There's no way to immediately leapfrog to the magic you need.

The lack of a quality-of-life feature as mainstream as a weapon wheel is quite noticeable in Immortals, which sees you frequently switch between your three equipped styles of magic. Not only does each color of magic fire differently, many enemies are armored against all but one color, meaning you need to oftentimes switch to a specific color when focusing on a new target. Early into the game, when you're only fighting a handful of enemies at a time, this drawback isn't that noticeable. But once you get far enough into Immortals' story, you find yourself fighting wave after wave of dozen-odd enemies, each of which requires a specific color of magic to defeat. And having to cycle through the animation of summoning green magic just to have the option to switch to the blue magic I need can be costly in as fast-paced a shooter as Immortals, where enemies hit hard and nimbly move about the battlefield. A carefully lined-up shot may no longer be there by the time you switch to the needed color.