Recent reviews by Frumious Bandersnatch

Ok, this is going to be a slightly longer review and i'll do my best to keep it in sections.

I had to really debate whether or not i would recommend this game to people. I like it, and it will likely improve over time, but right this second? its a very rough sell. I have a decent computer with a GPU thats just above recommended, a CPU thats /way/ above, and a ton more RAM than anyone needs. game is on an m2 drive.

Pro -

• Solid combat mechanics, very good feel
  
• large sprawling maps with a good number of dragons to mess with
  
• Interesting setting

Con -

• Multiplayer is... annoying to keep functional
  
• Game is better than it was in beta, but still has optimization problems.
  
• The story is... bad.
  
• There are very few dragons
  
• There are very few /creatures/.
  
  Probably my overall opinion is... good game, potentially a fantastic game... but not worth 70 dollars.
  
  
  Bugs
  Alright, first actual category... bugs and optimization. Running into stuff reasonably consistently. Been streaming for i guess around 25 hours over the last three days. Theres pathing bugs, AI bugs (which are often hilarious), and I'm running into periodic artifacting (which is recorded on stream). Beyond all of that, theres issues with maintaining a party up to and including periodic disconnects. my friend who is at minimum specs runs into way more issues up to and including outright crashes of his game, but i cant go into detail beyond casual mention cause its not my issues. I don't put much stock in them because it has been improving through the beta tests, but its still not actually done yet.
  
  
  Creatures
  I'll lump monsters and creatures together because creatures only gets a casual mention as i don't have the numbers for it.
  Suffice to say for as big as the maps are, they /feel/ empty. Be it in fallow, storm or plenty the maps just do not feel all that populated at least by small creatures and endemic life.
  
  In terms of dragons I have much more hard numbers. Running a comparison between the three games of this generation... Rise, Wilds and World. For the first set of numbers I'm not going into detail because the only detail that matters is the overall facts. The number of dragons on release day, not including small creatures and endemic life.
  
  Wilds - 29
  World - 37
  Rise - 46
  
  Now, for a slightly different analysis... Wilds and Rise are done on the same engine, and World is on the prior generation of the engine. Because of this and the relative ages, it should be mostly data entry to use monsters from one of the games in another of the games. this likely includes weapons and armor. towards that end and out of curiosity i did an analysis to compare the current numbers of all three games, which is not itself fair as Rise and World have been out for ages. but the point will follow
  
  Format is Game - [Number of basic dragon species] / [Number of elder dragons] / [Number of Subspecies and Variants from the first two categories]
  
  Sunbreak - 41/11/24
  Iceborne - 27/14/25
  Wilds - 24/4/3
  
  taking out all duplicate dragons (which would mostly crop up in the first data sets) I did an estimate of how many dragon's were in a pool of creatures that could be at relative low cost, added to the game, at least by direct port from the other two.
  
  Pool of creatures - 71/16/50
  
  The elder dragon category had 10 creatures removed because they were designed to be fought in specific arena's and as such the code may have to be redone in depth to get them to fight in an open world segment.
  
  to bring it back to the original data set, Wilds has 29 creatures from a pool of 137, and is a fair bit lower in number than the recent monster hunter games. part of that is the fact theres little to no variant creatures, which most of the prior games used to pad out the numbers by a fair bit.
  
  but suffice to say the number of dragon's in the game is rather low and impacts the feeling of a "living ecosystem" when even in lategame the dragon's in each map dont vary much. you can have around 10 dragons (the most i've seen anyway) on the same map but its only from something like 5-6 species per map, with some further limited by weather.
  
  
  Story
  Ok... this one i'm going to spoiler tag cause its convenient. suffice to say the story literally does not make sense, most specifically the plot reveal. Beyond that the english translation on some of the stuff is a little iffy, and i've heard rumblings about some of the other english elements. I wouldn't know for sure because I'm using japanese VA cause i generally like it better... and the english translation and VA markets have been a bit... sabotaged to put it neutrally.
  
  Ok. First inconsistency i noticed is that characters keep referring to "Wyverian" as both a species and a culture. the issue being if it is a species, it doesnt really make sense that both humans AND wyvernians (elves) are part of it. if its a culture, some of the other statements do not make sense. I did not catalogue it though I did note it in one of my streams when I came across it... just too tired to look it up.
  Second inconsistency is it is specifically stated that the Guardian's are engineered and customized clones, specifically designed to not need food, presumably water (though maybe they drink the wyvern milk stuff...) and are made to be /sterile/, since they are created clones. Presumably the system for them is automated. but with the above statements, it does not make sense for there to be dragon sized piles of feces scattered throughout Wyveria, and between the sterility and the fact there was apparently only ONE arkveld... the fact it laid an egg is functionally impossible.
  Third is that the Keepers are stated to be descended from the people who specifically made the Dragontorch and associated machinery... its been a thousand years, and they have been locked away largely within Sild on account of being too agoraphobic to leave the general area. there should be no reason whatsoever they do not know how the machinery functions... because either that knowledge likely should have been passed down to them or it would be in the various books... of which there are tons in Sild.
  The guardians are stated to have no inclination whatsoever to enter Sild, because its outside of their mandated patrol areas. Yet the very first interaction with the town a Rathalos beelines the door because it's been open for five seconds... tries to break it down and only after it figures out its still locked out (because uncle freaked out "It's trying to break in!") does it turn and try to kill you...
  
  it honestly feels like a lot of care was put into the general design of the setting, but the actual execution and way things was tied together was rather... confused, or carelessly done.
  
  i'll end on something i didn't really specify above, in no small part because I'm actually not sure how i feel about it at this early stage... the difficulty of the game is rather low. Part of this is because I actually know how to play monster hunter, but theres a number of things that are put in to make the game easier and more survivable. but me (and a number of my friends) are honestly just chilling out in low tier Arkveld armor going through the majority of high rank with not much in the way of difficulty. i personally am just not taking a ton of damage even when i get hit, despite how low my armor should be (judging by prior monster hunters) compared to what I am fighting. using basically any low rank armor, a rathalos (or equivalent) from high rank should be deleting me with any heavy attack and most medium attacks frankly... but i just dont take that much damage even when i screw up. and thats with me not using mantles (mostly) or the offset attacks.
  
  so far, the only fights that have been at all difficult are... Nu Udra, because up to that point most armor you get is fire weak. Jin Dahaad and Zoh Shia because I got hit with the instant kill. once. each.

fantastic game. loads of fun for anyone into melee combat or who wants to get some exercise but beat saber aint your thing for cardio.

Fantastic game. About par for course in gameplay as compared to other grand strategy games, but very cleanly done and overall I can't recommend this game hard enough. But outside of "clean" the overall mechanics of grand strategy dont change much except in detail, so the big addition for this is...

This game contains an in depth faction creator which is getting improved over time, a solid AI storyteller (for the quests mostly), and an AI artist thats trained on stardock work specifically. End result? you can create your faction or race and have the AI fill in the gaps for you to speed the entire process up... or give you some ideas.

Added bonus being they gave Epic the middle finger on their exclusivity deal which is double points in my book.

Fantastic game with a strong community; the only drawback is stupidity hurts rather literally. consistently added content with the only flop to date being sony forcing arrowhead to do require PSN accounts months after release... an act which the community pushed back on and got them to rescind.

otherwise? as i said. fantastic game with enough of a challenge to it (scaled) that you have heavy incentive to play intelligently... or die horribly. towards which end i will give anyone who reads this a fair warning -

Do not buy into the metagaming ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. pick your loadout based on /role/ and work with your team. there is no best loadout, only better and worse teams.

Summary -
This game should be good. It can be fun. But sheer frustration from the insane amount of issues kill this for me. Capped off by tech support that is given no tools to actually do anything, and a company (bandai) that literally does not give a ♥♥♥♥ about the game itself or us per a policy that states they will not accept any suggestions (and presumably feedback) for any reason or under any circumstance relating to their game or services. if any such is sent to them, they /will/ delete the message and outright ignore it.

If they dont care about the game or the community, I'm not going to invest any further time into it. No point.

I want to recommend this game. I did recommend this game to multiple friends to at least check out. I kind of wish I hadn't. Maybe they will learn when it comes to GBO3 but all things considered I doubt it. This particular game is likely dead and never going to get fixed because I have a strong suspicion that the developer team thats in charge of it is the japanese team, meaning this is not a priority. If they decide to make GBO3 and release on PC i'll be willing to check that out since gundam games are really really rare, but what with the way bandai treats their franchises I have a sinking suspicion this will be used as an excuse that "the west isnt interested in X". again. because it cant possibly be their fault.

Pro -
Its a rare gundam game available in the west AND on PC.
Massive selection of mobile suits spanning early and mid universal century (Early unicorn being the furthest)

Con -
Matchmaking sucks. Both the hardware and software (as far as i can determine) are lacking, resulting in the usual bit of mismatched teams in terms of skill, artificially long wait times (spent 10+ minutes at 11/12 players more than once), myriad connection errors throughout the process... it frequently takes longer to find a match than it takes to play the match.

Your ability to communicate or coordinate with your team is hamstrung, limited to a few preset phrases which are mostly "you got this!" type ♥♥♥♥.

The controls are designed to be janky as ♥♥♥♥, making this game feel more like a Mechwarrior game rather than a Gundam game. If you want anime style gundam combat, this game is not that. You get some flashy weapons and animations, but thats it. I will restate that this is not a bug, its an actual design decision to artificially slow down the gameplay by implementing bad controls.

Gacha - a japanese term "Gachapon" which if memory serves is a reference to the sound of a crank raffle with marbles in it. "Gacha" from the rattling noise as you crank it, and Pon being an impact sound when the marble falls out denoting what prize you get. My hatred of Gacha isnt from the system itself, but the fact that usually such systems are implemented in horrible and immensely predatory ways.

Gacha isnt inherently bad. It's the same as most other forms of monetization, it really depends on how you do it. In this case while the forgiveness mechanic (Recycle Tickets) is good, the rates are terrible and more importantly the gacha is cluttered with weapons which is separate issue. Specifically for the gacha the important part is its cluttered and the rates are ♥♥♥♥.

Multiple levels of weapons - Each weapon and suit has levels associated with them. for the suits this makes sense, because of the "cost" mechanic where for example everyone is restricted to max 600 cost suits. The levels allows you to get a stronger version of a lower cost suit and make it more appropriate for a particular battlefield. It doesn't scale well but it does scale. with that stated the weapons scaling is more of an issue because theres exactly zero benefit to getting higher level weapons in most cases. first, you still require the base suit to use the weapons and a fair number of them are very very specific about which suits can use them. I usually see any particular weapon being useable by 1-3 suits. further, a suit can only use a weapon of its own level at most. So a level 1 suit cant use a level 4 weapon. meaning most of the time when you roll a weapon in gacha its a dude, completely wasted slot.

Development - For unknown reasons this game does not get patched in any way responsive to the issues that are specific to this version. All the patches seem to come after a delay from the console version. The only response I have seen since release on the topic of the bugs with this particular version so far is them shutting off clans. No fix, no commentary, just turning the clans off until further notice.

Tech Support - Oh god. Okay. I've submitted a number of tickets to tech support over this game. 3-4 since release. Every single time I have come away more frustrated than going in. And I've worked service jobs so I usually am charitable towards people in such positions. In this case however... if you have an issue, do not bother contacting bandai tech support over it. They cannot help you. lets run the list shall we?

1. They cannot touch the ingame punishment systems at all, so if you get a punishment levied because of a bug well you are just out of luck. Disconnect punishment (first level) is 30 hours of being unable to earn crates (apparently) and your rewards being cut down to a fraction of what they normally are... and being outright barred from anything but custom games which cuts rewards in half by itself. After the 30 hours is up, you then have to run Ranked games until your record is clean again, so at least a few more games where you get ♥♥♥♥ all for rewards.
   
2. They cannot or will not give DP, Recycle tickets or Supply tokens for any issues, including ones that are acknowledged to be the games fault.
   
3. They have an explicit policy which states they will not accept suggestions/feedback from the community at all. Any such will be automatically discarded and unread.
   
4. Tech support policy basically means you do not have a dedicated person working your ticket, and instead will rotate between a number of individuals on a daily basis at minimum. Dunno if the rotation happens faster, I never got more than one response a day. to make that rotation even more cancerous they apparently do not read the ticket and instead I can only assume pass along some notations made on the ticket by each successive person. Meaning you can and will get asked for the same information over and over.

In this case tech supports only job is to be a whipping boy because they have no tools to address literally anything and can only make an already frustrated person more pissed off due to the limitations they are under.

Space maps... this ones a bit of a pet peeve - Fighting in space sounds really cool, but instead its just a more annoying version of ground based combat. While fighting in space, it is a full 3D battlefield where enemies can be easily above or below you in addition to on plane (including terrain). However, orientation is locked for all suits, with some suits being able to rotate up and down a bit further than the others. it makes about as much sense as the ability to "knock down" a mobile suit in space. how precisely does "i've fallen and i cant get up" work WHEN THERES NO GROUND?!

The iconic autism simulator. Been playing this game for ages and the steam upgrades are generally awesome. Little different than classic, but great. I do wish you could go to classic embark options though; embarks feel a bit easy with how much stuff you can bring and how skilled the dwarves are.

TL;DR - I can recommend this game for people just wanting to have fun with it. If you like Vermintide or Warhammer 40k this will probably be fun for you. If your finicky about polish and content, wait for awhile.

lets structure this a little. I'll leave a header on each that more or less sums up the issue, with more specific points after.

Con- The game is not done.
The crafting system is not complete.
There are "only" four characters, with one class each.
In light of the other stuff this becomes a con - The cash shop is in and functional with a (admittedly small) selection of cosmetics.
The weapons system is character locked, in spite of everyone (except ogryn) using the exact same weapons.

Pro- It's fun.
Randomized missions, and fair sized maps with semi randomized pathing through them. may or may not be randomized tiles, not sure.
Good base mechanics
Fun characters (mostly)
Mostly good weapon design (combat design)
Good matchmaking. not in terms of player skill, but reliably getting player teams.

Pet Peeve - Ogryn.
This ones not going to be clean like the above, because its too specific to just do bullet points.
Ogryn's are big and bulky bullet sponges... and are really bad at their job unless they use the shield. Which prevents them from doing much of anything except being mobile cover (which is a teamwork thing and doesnt mesh well with randoms.
Ogryn's have a massive hitbox with very ♥♥♥♥♥♥ toughness regeneration, and (same as everyone but the zealot) zero ability to regenerate health. End result is when i play Ogryn, i go down faster than literally any of my other characters, including my Psyker.

The skullbreaker class should not have been its class out the gate. First reason being that the class is very poorly designed. In theory its an anti-elite melee oriented class... with no real ability to sustain itself. Meaning that big mook is "in theory" supposed to stand behind a group of people half his height using ranged weapons he has no real perk support for until something too big pops up. Then he charges in to save the day. Something better to start with would have literally been either a defensive oriented class thats difficult to drop, or a heavy weapons class centered around big weapons like rippa and stubba.

The big flaws are the fact that it has some damage reduction but no real way to regenerate health (of which it has a ton, but if its a finite resource it doesnt matter how much it has), and worse yet the only methods to regenerate toughness /suck/.
level 5 perks -
Double toughness replenishment. Great. You go from 5 points to 10 per kill with a hitbox more than twice anyone elses. Shared to all allies in range though so theres that. may also double regen speed (hard to test), but even if it does that requires you to stop getting hit... and once more. Big. Ass. Target.

Replenish toughness on heavy attack against a single target / 3+ targets... excuse you? what the hell is this?
First, heavy attacks suck in hordes when your character (any of them) get flinched from any attack, cancelling the windup entirely....
second, heavy attacks /especially/ suck on Ogryns. Two reasons - one, they are bigger but have no more stagger resist than the other classes... and two is that their heavy attacks are generally horizontal (vanguard or relentless) which limits their utility in dealing with big guys, but makes them good at hordes... you know, the time they cant really use them because a bunch of pinpricks are stopping their attacks.

Die Hard - Double toughness replenishment when below 25% health. sounds great if it stacks with lynchpin to give 4x toughness regen, but realistically im pretty sure its going to be crap because your going to be trying very hard in most cases to /not/ be below 25% hp. which means most times it shouldnt be on.

Non-stop Violence - 10% toughness per target hit by bull rush... this one might be useful full stop. Under circumstances where you need the toughness regen, you probably will be surrounded by mobs, so full heal basically instantly. its a level 30 perk though so it'll be awhile before you get to use it.

I like playing ogryn. I have fun playing ogryn. but that is not because of its design, but in spite of it. I love the fact theres a marked height difference so i have to look way down (or crouch) in order to not swing over enemies at my feet. I love all the other problems that are entailed by being a big slab. I dont really like the weapons by and large or the perks, but thats disinterest not distaste (well, outside melee weapons. most of them i cant stand using because of the stupid focus on using heavy attacks to clear hordes literally baked into the weapon designs.) but sweet jesus i cant wait for a decent class to come out for it and maybe if im a good boy a melee weapon i dont actively loathe, or a gun i find fun.

fantastic game. nuff said. its the same sort of thing SRW always is, but clean with a massive facelift and a fair number of quality of life changes. highly recommended.

Admittedly rough start back when it was first released; far as I can tell however it has since taken all the complaints more or less in stride and used them to fulfill every promise I'm aware of them making, but to go above and beyond those promises all without charging a single additional cent. I'll give them kudos for that especially in the current gaming climate.

generally speaking the game looks great and while the gameplay itself is rather simplistic, thats largely because its an exploration based game. its more or less minecraft in space. well, with good graphics anyway.

if your expecting some grand adventure, RPG, shooter or whatever else... this aint your game. if you like just a basic survival/exploration/simulation game? this should actually be your speed.

rather enjoyed the game. i went ahead and cleared it, and am now going to attempt to finish out the side quests. this is rather rare for me to stick with a game like this all the way through without an actual effort.

the graphics are pretty well done, the characters are very interesting, and while i do somewhat wish there was a bit more choice involved, i dont have any problems with the storyline and you cant really expect every game to give drastic storyline freedom.

the 'boss' fights are interesting and somewhat difficult without being bogged down with stupid mechanics of 'you HAVE to kill this boss this way'... the mindless hordes of enemies tend to keep you distracted enough to avoid a straight slugfest with the Captains and Warchiefs... and theres very real repercussions to being careless.

i'd love to see more games like this on the market for sure, and i would definately say check this game out.