Recent reviews by Dave

Final Thoughts:
This game has an absolute gem of a core, but between connectivity issues and some absolute piss-poor design decisions this game will chase away the majority of its playerbase before they see the good stuff underneath. With that being said, I think one of the strongest qualities of this game is that it is not some binge-able story. You can binge it for 8 hours a day if you want, and some weebs certainly will, but like War Thunder or WoT this one is best when picked at over time. Especially when matchmaking failures force you to re-queue every time.

First Impressions/Learning (0-2 hours):
- Big phone game/gacha vibes. I love the pulls, but the game does seem microtransaction-heavy, and the microtransactions are quite expensive.
- Have to get used to controlling menus without point-and-click. Super weird, but this doesn’t really bother me.
- The game is pretty laggy, and the game session menus are super janky. Lots of failed matchmaking, which forces you all the way out of the queue is too frustrating, so I quit for the night.
- Graphics are fine; they aren’t cutting-edge AAA quality, but the mechs look great and have lots of detail.
- Gameplay feels very different from what I’m used to in multiplayer shooters. Controlling a mech is very fun and they do all feel pretty distinct from each other, somehow, despite sharing a lot of weapons and animations. Slower combat and TTK feel more strategic than games like CoD, R6, or Tarkov; there’s no way to 1-tap so you actually get fights, and smart choices are rewarded (likewise, dumb ones are punished. It feels like there is a high skill ceiling; the game is easy to learn, but hard to master.
- A major part of play is poking for holes in opponent’s defense, juggling weapon cooldowns to do so, and trying to find a good moment to push in for melee/big damage. It’s so unique, I love the setting, and most importantly it feels super fun to play.

Honeymoon Phase (2-6 hours):
- It’s hard to find a match now; I’m guessing servers are overloaded.
- The training is so worth doing to completion: it demos useful techs; unlikely anyone who isn’t super into the game will do all these though. It does very much seem like you need to be invested in the game and desire to drive progression yourself by completing the quest log. Ultimately, you teach yourself how to play. Granted, quest log is self-guided tutorials, but almost everyone I know either wouldn’t catch this or wouldn’t care enough to do it. You hurt yourself by not doing the tutorials, and the game hurts itself by not stressing how important they are or forcing players to do them. For example: there is a rock-paper-scissors meta going on between raid, general, and support classes which requires training scenarios to learn about, as well as dashing after melee, tackle counters, etc.
- Combat can feel a little janky - because of the slower movement punctuated by bursts of fast forward movement, you open yourself up to severe punishment by not moving accurately. You might dash in for melee, but if you don’t finish your dash at the precise right spot, you might miss your attacks and then get knocked down and slapped around. It’s hard to fault this too much, though, because ultimately it’s just like doing ‘flicks’ in FPS games, on a slower, less-punishing (because you don’t get 1-tapped in the skull) scale.
- It feels so rewarding when you find a hole and start slapping people around. At the same time, it feels horrible when you get mogged and/or punished, and this feels proportionately worse depending how many people on the opposite team are punishing you at once.
- Customization goes pretty deep. There are so many parts to use. It’s overwhelming to look at first, but fun to dig into once you understand what’s going on. The interface is genuinely bad, though; the lack of point and click navigation hamstrings things. You can use the arrow keys or middle mouse button as cheap stand-ins, but it’s obvious this game was built for controllers.
- I hate that matchmaking fails by kicking you out of the whole queue and menu to go back to the lady, who tells you what a good job you did. You really can’t just try re-queue from inside the lobby screen instead of making me do it manually every time?

Post-Honeymoon Phase (6+ hours):
- What is this friendly fire system? It’s so dumb. The way it’s implemented now is that you do no damage to teammates, but your attacks can and will stagger them. Apparently it’s OK to troll your teammate by shooting them off defusing a bomb, but if you shoot back it boots you. Absolutely unbelievable.
- Tackling feels incredibly inconsistent. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m not sure if this is because the timings of every melee weapon are slightly different, if the netcode is bad, some combination of the two, or something else entirely. This criticism starts at what is ultimately (I think) a skill issue, so take it with a grain of salt.
- It feels easy to blame losses on teammates and/or team comp, and the matchmaking feels pretty imbalanced. It is too often the case that one team rolls over the other, rather than having a good back-and forth. This is compounded because even when I outperform my team, if the whole team is bad I still lose matches and thereby rank. This is softened by the rival system, but that only gives you one point back, which is totally inconsequential. This might sort itself out as the game ages and the skill brackets start to settle.
- I wish there was a larger scale mode with more players; the 6v6 feels good on some of the larger maps, but I imagine 8v8 or 12v12 matches on an even larger scale would be a blast.
Unfortunately, this will never happen, as the game is structured around 8 minute matches. It’s a funny juxtaposition, actually: this is the slowest and most strategic gameplay I’ve experienced since Gears of War, paired with probably the fastest match times I’ve ever seen outside of hacked CoD nuke lobbies.
- Picking an MS to fill a gap in the team’s comp feels like it pays dividends every time, but on the other hand it feels like when I don’t that the team is made to suffer every time. This sucks a lot, because I have mechs I want to play, and as it stands I feel shoehorned into choosing between playing what I want or actually having a chance at winning. Right now it feels like a guaranteed loss when your team has 4 generals and 1 support, for example, and this represents one of the worst things about LoL before they added in role queuing.

i cried https://youtu.be/EWvM9vP8KJk