Recent reviews by AlienArtifice

TLDR?
Wishlist it, wait for a good sale, and consider that the "base price." There is nowhere near enough real content to justify the asking price but this is Steam: it will go on sale and at a lower price, I'd say it's worth it—especially if you want to tackle the Inferno DLC.

The Good?
> A few characters and abilities are insanely overpowered(detailed below).
> Dispatch missions have better returns for experience/capital than the base game's and give you a major early-game boost in the form of about a dozen mobile suits that you can grab in a few minutes(also more below).
>Burning Finger and all the silly lines everyone has for it.

The Bad?
> No new playable missions or warships and nothing from the Universal Century.
>> Seriously, these are stuff packs not mission packs. The non-discounted price is a massive ripoff.
> The Moonlight Butterfly isn't lore friendly{ie: it kind of sucks}.
> No real integration with the base game at all—units can't be developed into other units, character abilities can only be dropped from the DLC dispatches, etc.

The Mixed?
> The added Mobile Suits in general. Some are good, none are game breaking, and the rest is just personal taste.
>> For my own personal taste, the Gundam X mobile suits don't really impress me but the characters from there are more than overpowered enough to make up for it.
> Quests to add the new units to the production list feel kind of pointless.

Breakdown

Dispatches:
Still a weird, vaguely stupid mobile game mechanic but the DLC ones are flat-out better in most ways. They're objectively more efficient for money and capital and also give first time completion rewards that are great for the early game: By using the cooldown items you get from one to skip the next, you can end up with a dozen odd decent mid-tier mobile suits, which is a huge boost when you're first starting out, in just a few minutes.

Even the worst team will still slowly crank up that completion meter towards stuff like the Turn X or Burning Gundam but it's slow enough that the initial boost has more impact.

Quests:
That is, bonus objectives. The new ones are basically just minor checks against the above. Before you can make a copy of something, you need to do a particular thing with the unit, its pilot, or both—depends on the exact mobile suit. Aside from punishing people who decide to just sell the things, gating production off like this is . . . kind of stupid and pointless, if you ask me. Almost all of them are trivial to pull off, though: and if you accidentally sell one before registering it(which I did), you can still get new copies by running the right dispatch with a good enough group.

Mobile Suits:
Gameplay-wise, they're not bad but not game breakers. A few of them are disappointing. For example, the Moonlight Butterfly has been nerfed to oblivion—relative to the show but I've also read that it was less pathetic in earlier games—and everything else on the Turn A comes off as underpowered to me.

A few other units are genuinely powerful but they're comparable to the base game top tiers and you can't get more of them through the development system. You can only build/buy them directly or throw a very good team at the DLC dispatches.

That's probably the biggest downside of these units. The first set you get is kind of a crutch because of it; they're a great help at first but unlike stuff like the Tornado, you can't use them to expand the gallery or get most of the best units in the game for a tiny fraction of the price.

In terms of fun, it's obviously all subjective but there are a few iconic mobile suits here. You can throw the freaking Moonlight Butterfly around(it's still a good move; just not as apocalyptic as it should be); use the Burning finger and see all the silly lines everyone has for it; etc. I personally like the Gundam X stuff but if you want to go hunting for favorites, go check the individual DLC pages. I can't read minds.

Modifications:
Not flashy but still useful. The Season Pass mobility boosts, in particular, can be stacked with the base game ones to send mobile suits flying across the map.

Characters & Abilities:
In general? Someone else mentioned that the characters tend to be better overall than the base game ones—I'm guessing that's in terms of stats. Personally, I pay a bit less attention to those than I should and use both DLC and base game characters. Out of hundreds of characters, plenty of them have good stat scaling.

That said, a few of the DLC abilities are just ridiculous. One combination in particular is insanely overpowered. Tiffa Adill and Jamil Neate, both from Gundam X, have abilities that increase the amount of Chance Steps they can do. Tiffa's can't be trained but you can give her(and everyone else) Jamil's version.

Compared to the base game's three, five kills per turn for her and four for everyone else is incredible. The training is expensive, though—any character who doesn't have Awaken scaling needs both Jamil's Ability(60k capital) and up to ~190k capital to get the 500 Awaken it needs to work.

Both characters also have good stat scaling on their own but they are from different DLC pack; without the Season Pass(this), you'll need both to get the full, overpowered benefit of this combination.

Side note: I personally stuck Tiffa into Hashmal and have not once removed her since.

Anyway, as I see it, that combo is by far the biggest gameplay boost in the Season Pass but it's not the only one. Overall, DLC-added character abilities vary a lot in value and uniqueness but there are a few more standouts.

For example, Military Style Martial Arts is exactly the same as Melee Combat 2. The character who has it(Allenby Beardsley) has one of her ability slots blocked by useless trash that may as well be flavor text at higher levels.

Support Crew, on the other hand, boosts all crew stats by twenty percent, making it by far the most powerful ability for warship crewmembers, especially since there aren't very many that do anything for them to begin with. Rain Mikamura, its original user, seems to scale up to a decent Ranged pilot but has one of her slots blocked by Mechanic 2.

Super Pilot increases damage based on the number of kills its user has. According to a guide I've read, that goes up to 10,000. I haven't tried to figure out the exact scaling but I've confirmed that everyone involved in a warship linkup, including crewmembers, gets credited for all of the kills. So: not quite as hard as it sounds. It costs 300,000 capital to give it to someone, though, and once again, its original user has another fixed ability that's pretty weak and worthless.

There are other useful Abilities in the Season pass but none quite so unique as those and this review has gone on more than long enough.

This is much more robust than I first thought it was. There are a lot of cool, gimmicky, and resource-intensive wallpapers that are only fun for awhile but I've personally found that I like having a clock on one monitor and something with good background music on another. It's usually not too hard to find those for any given theme, either.

Hard game, especially first starting out, but it gets quite fun later on once you've unlocked a few characters and a key artifact or two. Definitely built for multiplayer, though, with the added bonus that the max player limit(and the save file, for that matter) is extremely easy to modify.

Doesn't take itself seriously at all and doesn't really need to, either. Basic but fun.

Definitely has potential. Pretty fun already, for that matter.

Admittedly, I first checked out this game for the hat in Team Fortress. That said, it's quite a fun and underrated game in its own right. All it really needs is workshop support.

My only real complaint is that the progression system is tailored for a more popular game than it currently is, but that doesn't take too much away from the fun.