Until the day Bandai Namco Entertainment announces the next Armored Core game, I am inconsolable. The game's unique speed and mechanics has me searching for anything that might fill the void of speeding around in a colossal war machine carrying an Orphan Melter 9000.

This leads me to Doll's Nest, an upcoming game seemingly pulling from the same influences as my favorite mech game with a twist- rather than playing as something out of Bandai's HG Gunpla line, you're instead playing as something out of the 30 Minutes Sisters catalogue. 

Having played a bit of the current demo build, it's hard to not draw comparisons with Armored Core. If it's not directly inspired by it it's definitely aiming for a similar fantasy, that of high sspeed combat and managing your various equipped weapons.

It's Got The Speed

Unsuprisingly, Doll's Nest has got one of the most important ingredients for an Armored Core-like down pat- the speed. Your Doll moves decently fast, being able to lunge forward in qucik bursts or a sustained move. 

That being said, movement itself is very different. The patented side-boost isn't as much of a thing in Doll's Nest, as you're more prone to sustained strafing or rushing down to get a hit with any melee weapons you've equipped. 

Overall combat in general is more committal- reload times are long even for melee weapons, and it feels like there's far less for you to actually react to, placing more emphasis into your ability to plan beforehand. 

You even see it in the loadout planning- heavier weapons tend to be restricted to the Weapon Bays, something you might notice in the older Armored Core titles as a means of restricting your builds. 

On one hand, you'd be correct in thinking it makes you slow down your gameplay somewhat. You can't be boosting all around the stage if your weapons are both on cooldown. Yet there exists a really fun alternative to this: get familiar enough with your kit that you can do so with extreme precision.

Doll's Nest features a souls-like checkpoint system, where after every death you're allowed to keep items you pick up but you're sent back to the last Tree you've passed. You can corpse run your way into competence here, suddenly zooming past every enemy with the exact number of shots or sword swings to wipe them out. 

You'll really want to learn these optimal routes too because of one of the game's more bizarre features- every time you reload, you consume a resource aside from ammo. It's such a strange mechanism, but basically reloading a single weapon too much stands to lock you out of all your weapons. There's consumables to refill the resource but ultimately you'll want to use them at your peril- who knows if using up all your Supplements will be followed up directly by you dying anyways. 

Still A Demo

While I'm quite excited for Doll's Nest in general, a lot of that optimism is in what I hope the game will be at launch. Naturally, the game is very much still a work-in-progress, with some features like weapon feedback noticeably missing. Even the controls can feel a little floaty- though given how fast you're meant to be boosting, I wouldn't be surprised if that was an intentional choice. 

With a nice coat of polish and more content, Doll's Nest could very well be something special- just messing around its labrynthine structure was enough to get me interested. I'd recommend checking out the demo for yourself to see how you like its control scheme- there's 3 starter classes to choose from, all accommodating different builds. 

Personally, I've still got high hopes for this one- comparing it directly to Armored Core would never have been fair, and it gets surprisingly far despite what I can only assume are markedly less resources.