Recent reviews by ELES

Day 5 account update:

Currently C1 in ruby group

113 card packs pulled (according to card pack points which doesn't track the daily login free pack) with 28 legendaries.

Made 2 decks that are good for ranked (missing 1 or 2 legends):
Mid Sword containing 1 Kagemitsu, 2 Alberts, 3 Amelias
Storm Dragon containing 1 Olivia, 2 Fortes, 2 Garyus

Have 3 other decks that can compete but a lot harder since they're missing more legendaries:
Aggro Abyss containing 2 Aragavy, 2 Cerb
Roach Forest containing 1 Amataz, 1 Aria
Puppet Portal containing 2 Orchids

Have 5680 vials on-hand and +8850 if I auto-liquify extras, bringing the total to 14530 if I need vials (Not even counting the shinies (premium) since those don't get selected/counted by auto-liquify and needs to be done manually and I'm too lazy to count those).

Total amount spent: 2$ getting the "First Farer Box" 10 pack.

Overall: Not bad, really. Game is a lot of fun and you can totally make some competitive decks with a little luck or perserverance. I'm feeling the rewards drying up though as I've only opened 10 packs on day 4 and 10 packs day 5, but that's pretty normal compared to SV1 where you only open 1 to 3 packs a day depending if events are up and what dailies you get.

If you really want a competitive deck guaranteed, just reroll for it on your phone or an android emulator like BlueStacks, don't do it on Steam since you cannot reroll on the Steam version. Do it on phone or BlueStacks first and then just link/transfer your game data to the Steam version once you're satisfied with your starting pulls. A friend of mine did this Day 4 and got 2 Ralmias and 2 Orchids from the 40 packs you get from starting; took him just 1hr 30mins of rerolling and only because he really wanted to play Portal, he could've done it faster if he was okay with any competitive deck but he really wanted Portal. He then redeemed the free Artifact Portal starter, crafted some Miriams and Alouettes, and then proceeded to steamrolled his Beginner and D ranks opponents in just 1 day without spending anything.

If you don't wanna spend or reroll or have bad luck with your starting rolls then there are many budget decks than can still be competitive (though obviously not as good as their fully-kitted counterparts). Check the many youtube videos for those or the japanese game8 site for SVWB.

The liquify/vial restriction is not good and really needs to be changed. But overall, the experience is still positive for me and hopefully Cygames wakes up and removes that stupid liquify/vial restriction.

Lemme repeat:


#1 The invite friends program: From the home screen, there's a cycling banner that says "Invite Friends", enter someone's invite code there to get 2000 gold instantly (only once). Here's a code you can use: GSp6abk (it's my friend's). Check steam discussions or reddit or other reviews for someone's friend code or if you have friends that play, ask them for their code. You can also share your code to others and earn gold based on your recruits hitting certain milestones. Share your code in the comments section or anywhere.

#2 Do the First-Farer missions on home screen: Rewards lots of rupies and doing all of them will allow you to pick 1 out of the 9 prebuilt starter decks for free. These decks have a decent shell for an archetype, I suggest opening many packs first before deciding on your free starter deck - decide based on what golds and legendaries you get from your packs that can enhance or complete your choice of starter deck.

#3 The story and practice vs AI give gold the first time you beat them. All the classes have easy, medium, and hard AI, easy gives 50 gold, medium 100, and hard 200. If you beat all the practice AI, you get a total of 2450 gold.

#4 Link your account to a Cygames ID. The game will give you a pop-up about this every time you login, also in the home screen. Do it so they stop pestering you and you get 5 free packs.

#5 Link your old Shadowverse account. You can get free packs and other minor stuff depending on your old Shadowverse account's progress / rank. Login to old Shadowverse and from the old game's home screen, there's a rotating banner there's "Data Link to SV: Worlds Beyond", just follow the steps from there, it's pretty simple.

#6 Do the quests, there's tons of quests that give gold / packs. The First-Farer missions from the home screen, Daily Missions and Battlepass from the home screen, Park Quest and Bingo Missions (press F3 in the park to view these), Rupies Galore event and Park chest in the middle of the park, etc... There's many avenues of earning free gold here, just gotta know where to look for them.

$7 Join a guild. Guild ranks will reward vials depending on guild GRP and individual GRP at the end of a season. A rank and higher guilds get 3500 vials at end of season.

This is a rare positive review from someone who's played the game for 11 hours on release day (1st day review).

Now before I get to the why I'm giving it a positive review, let me first echo what everyone else is giving this game a bad review for: the vials / dust / disenchant / liquefy system being limited to cards you have more than 3 copies of is stupid and should be changed to being able to liquefy any card regardless of the amount you own. The collector's compendium isn't an excuse for this limitation.

For as to why I'm giving it a positive review - it is simply because I've had a good time with my first 11 hours. A short breakdown of my experience: I was able to pull 65 packs for free, got to collection level 9 with 114/142 cards in the compendium, ranked up to D-0 with just 13 wins / 6 losses using a deck that only has 2 legendaries, and did almost all of the quests - all with barely spending anything. The only amount I've spent here was 2$ getting the "First Farer Box" for a 10 pack; no other purchases were made.

Now people criticize the prices of booster packs increasing from 100 gold to 500 gold; but people seem to miss that quests and rewards also give higher amounts of gold now. I don't think it's fair to complain about the price of booster packs without acknowledging the increase in gold gain as well; if someone can do the math and show that you cannot make a decent deck from playing F2P then I would also complain, but since I was able to make 2 decks that were winning more than 50% of my matches, I do not see how it is not viable for F2P. Just from free currency and free packs, I was able to open 65 packs (75 if you count my 10pack 1.5$ purchase). The change to legendaries being guaranteed to atleast one in every 10 packs is very big. I've gotten 15 legendaries out of just 65 packs. In the old game, one could open 50 packs and not even get 3. Haven't even claimed the free preconstructed deck from finishing the First-Farer missions. Maybe in the future when the meta becomes expensive and decks needing more than 3 legendaries to be competitive then I would complain that there isn't enough free stuff. But for this 1st day, I've been doing well with a deck that only has 2 legendaries and getting to open 65 free packs is just way more free stuff compared to the old game when it just started.

Anyways, this is just a day 1 review, first-impressions more like. The vial system really needs to go back to the old way though.

I was gonna make a negative review based on my feedback on the demo outlying several problems I've found with this game (especially when comparing it to Patapon 2), but the devs have already made an announcement on June 9 responding to most of the negative feedback of the players who played the demo. Looks like the devs are really listening and will make many changes based on players' feedback. I am now optimistic that this game could become a true spiritual successor to the Patapon series.

Dev announcement here responding to player feedback:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2949320/view/520841474254834489?l=english

Update: The devs fixed most of people's gripes with the battlepass so I'm changing my review to positive.

Good autobattler with much variety of plays and counterplays. The battlepass still kinda sucks but atleast it doesn't revert progress anymore when you lose. Recommended.

Good game but very poor implementation of a rewards progression system that is confusing, frustrating, and very anti-player.

What kind of battlepass goes backwards in progress whenever you lose matches?? Also winning a match gives you 300~1500 rewards points but losing a match deducts 2000+ points. You gotta be a god at this game to progress the friggin' battlepass. There's days where I get more wins than losses, actually gain MMR, but the battlepass progress still goes backwards...

The devs and the community recommend playing later in the season when it'll be easier to earn rewards points. What kind of battlepass discourages players from playing the friggin' game?? Battlepasses are supposed to boost player engagement, not take away from it.

This game is very dead. No one really queues for "Classic mode", the mode for new players - it takes like 30+ minutes to queue for a game in that mode.

The core gameplay loop of the game feels very satisfying; customizing your mech - using it to do missions/arena to earn credits - use said credits to get more parts - repeat.

Combat and movement feels satisfying and spectacular. There's a lot of build variety with many parts you can unlock as you progress and you can tune your mech to fit your playstyle. You can make heavy tanks that fit as much firepower as they can, or lightweight agile speed demons that can dodge almost everything, or permanently hovering rockets and grenade spamming air-superiority mechs, or melee focused in-your-face builds, etc... There's so much build variety that replaying a mission with different builds never feel boring.

Unfortunately, some of the weapon balance is quite off as it's easy to accidentally stumble on one of the many broken combinations that will trivialize the game and make bosses a cakewalk. Despite this, the game is still really fun and you can choose to use or not use said broken combos depending on how much/less challenge you want from the game. Customization is the game's strongest aspect so I think it's just fitting that you can sorta adjust the game's "difficulty" with with certain builds.

EDIT: They fixed the weapon balance with some updates. All the really broken weapons got toned-down and all the underperforming weapons got buffed. Now there's even more build variety which is a big win if you like the customization aspect of this game.

Changing my review from negative to a positive one after the recent maintenance on June 15 and June 22 have improved the matchmaking servers by a lot. There are still times when the matchmaking craps out; particularly on Japanese primetime and on weekends, but other than that - it gets you in games much much faster than before the maintenances. The matchmaking servers crapping out all the time was my main grievance with this game and I am glad they sorta fixed that.

The gameplay of this game is really fun and satisfying. It captures the feel of piloting heavy, giant robots. There's over 300 mechs you can collect; each with different stats and loadouts, and also customizeable. Over 80% of the mechs you can just buy from the in-game store with currency earned from playing. It's not hard to grind for currency too so I wouldn't say that paying for gacha is a must for this game. Also a lot of the OP gacha units are limited to the 700-cost battles - which only rarely appear and easy to avoid. Definitely F2P-friendly as far as a gacha game goes.

Sadly, everything outside the gameplay kinda sucks. The UI sucks and navigating the menus is a pain. After you get your daily login screen, there's no way you can view it again until the next day. The gacha rates aren't displayed in-game and you have to go to a website to see them. Buying weapons for your mechs is a pain because instead of just buying it from the loadouts menu, you have to go to an NPC and there's no filter to show only the weapons that can be equipped by mechs you own, so you have to look it up on a wiki what weapons your mechs can equip and buy those.

Despite the many problems though, the gameplay is really good. If you can get over the many issues and the lengthy tutorial (highly recommend doing all of them), then you'll find there's actually a good game buried beneath all that mess.

Hopefully BAMCO fixes all the remaining issues. Gundam fans deserve better treatment than what BAMCO is doing.

Tips for new players:
Use a referral code, mine is eles - to get 100 free gold. Just click "Friends" on the bottom-right corner of the main menu, click on "claim a friend's referral code" and input eles to get your 100 free gold. (only applicable if you have not yet played ranked/ladder)

Play and win with every faction at-least once - as winning with all 6 factions gets you a random legendary card; also getting a faction to level 2 will give you a free card pack so doing this would also give you 6 free packs.

Pros and cons:
Pros:
+Six factions to play that each have their own unique playstyles
+Lots of faction cards that are unique to their faction and tons of non-faction-specific neutral cards add a lot of variety and depth to deck-making
+Good music and awesome pixel-art animated graphics
+Can reconnect if you disconnect mid-match; just don't take too long or the game will automatically concede for you

Cons:
-Games can drag on especially if the enemy is turtling or roping
-Lacks draft mode from the original
-Lacks daily puzzles from the original
-The lack of both draft mode and daily puzzles make gaining currency a bit limited, hopefully they patch those back in

For SEA region, it takes 15 minute queue for survivors; instant queue for killers. Games usually ends around 5-10 minutes. It takes longer to queue as survivor than to actually play a match. That's because no one wants to play killers anymore as the game's direction keeps shifting towards making it easier for survivors and making things clunkier and unfun for killers. Worse is the shift to matchmaking where MMR is determined by kills and escapes - which creates a toxic and unfun environment where killers just tunnel and camp to get kills and survivors just abandon teammates to escape. I wouldn't say this game is terribly unbalanced; there's some unbalance, sure - but the bigger problem for me is the shift to the meta where killers have to play "dirty" if they want to win. Playing with or against "dirty" tactics is just not fun and the only time I actually play this game is when I have nothing else to play. Also there's so much perks in this game now - the grind has become absolutely ridiculous.

EDIT: 2024 and this game is STILL getting regular content updates. The game has gotten so much content updates, it feels like an entirely new game. Truly the most supported video game on Steam and for such a small price too. Absolutely worth it.

The amount of content and updates this game has gotten over the past 4 years is impressive considering it's also pretty cheap. Tons of mods too to mix things up if the base content starts to bore you.

"Finely balanced, low RNG" is a huge lie, just take a look at the cards Seductress Vampire and Calamity Bringer; just 2 cards in the current top tier deck (as of posting this review). This game had been devolving into who can highroll the most for the past year but now they've completely dropped any pretense of "Finely balanced, low RNG" by introducing a card that by merely drawing it, gives you a huge advantage for the rest of the match. Yes, you don't even need to play it, you just need to draw it.