Recent reviews by ELES

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.

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.

Surprisingly good for its price. Lots of stages and 4 ships to choose from. Usually goes for 90% off during sales, if you're a fan of shmups then this is a really good deal for a decent shmup.

EDIT: Changing the review to negative as there is a gamebreaking issue making this game unplayable for anyone with a monitor that has more than 60hz refresh rate. Seems like the game speed is tied to the framerate and the game defaults the framerate based on your monitor's refresh rate; making the game run at more than twice the speed for me because I have a 144hz monitor. There is no in-game option to limit the framerate and the devs haven't responded to my issue when I posted it in their support thread.

Not recommended to purchase until they fix this gamebreaking issue.

How can a multi-million-dollar company take a free custom game mod and somehow make it worse? By gutting features, doing questionable balance changes, adding a garbage user interface, having matches last longer, and making the game even more RNG dependent - that's how.

Just play the original (Dota2 mod or mobile game) until this one gets more polish.

This game had a really rocky start when it released - wonky connections for multiplayer, poor optimization, lack of typical PC graphical options, and poor mouse support - all these problems led to 10,000+ negative reviews that pushed this game's rating down. Thankfully, most of these problems have been fixed and I can confidently say that the PC port now delivers the best Monster Hunter World experience.

Advantages of MHW PC over consoles:
·The game loads areas super fast (5 secs vs. consoles' 30+ secs)
·Maintains a good framerate even on high settings (60FPS vs consoles' 30~50FPS)
·Has the option to play with controller or mouse and Keyboard
·Can play online multiplayer without having to subscribe to PS Plus or Xbox Live
·Mods


Disadvantages over consoles:
·Peer-to-peer multiplayer connection can sometimes be wonky
·Release of additional free content is behind by 1~2 months compared to consoles
·Performance varies by PC specs; a crap PC will perform similar or worse than consoles

Gameplay-wise, Monster Hunter World is an action RPG where you fight big, bad monsters and collect their loot to craft weapons and armors that will help you fight bigger, badder monsters; this is the core gameplay loop of the game and what others might call "the grind" but the combat is so enjoyable it hardly feels like a grind.

The combat system is deep with 14 different weapon types that vary greatly from each other - each weapon type has their own nuances and quirks that it sometimes feels like a different game when you switch to a different weapons (check this video for a basic intro of the 14 weapons).

Mastery of your weapon type determines the success of your hunts much more than just having better gear. Mastery is the most rewarding aspect of Monster Hunter - as you gradually get better, so too will the success of your hunts go.

Asides from hunting monsters, there are many other activities in MHW to keep you busy - finding ingredients for the canteen, collecting and catching native wildlife, befriending the local tribes of humanoid cats, gathering resources, and fishing. Most of these activies will also help you in your hunts in some way so it doesn't feel like a waste of time when you do them.

The game is tons of fun playing with friends online, and playing with randoms is also very easy as you can join anyone that fired an SOS flare (or fire one yourself). Playing solo is also an option and the whole game can be soloed.

Overall - I highly recommend this game to action RPG fans that enjoy challenging combat and deep gameplay systems.

Just another terrible PC port from another Japanese dev that refuse to beta-test and optimize their game before PC release.

Fullscreen mode is broken; and windowed mode only has 3 presets with 2 of them having bad downscaling - the 2d sprites and the 3d backgrounds look bad on the lower resolutions because of this.

Keyboard prompts keep popping up even if you're using a controller - makes the game really confusing when it shows you to press "K" when you're using an xbox controller.

Dunno if there's input lag or the game just runs so bad that it feels like there is.

Online matchmaking with other players just fails 50% the time for me, even though I'm on the proper region.

Even with all the manual band-aid "fixes" on the discussion forums - the game still has lots of problems.

If you're interested in this game - maybe wait a few months and see if they actually fix the problems before buying - or wait for a deep sale.

To the devs: Beta-test your games before release; if there's problems - put it on early access first or do a closed-beta. Many players don't wanna put up with this crap on a full release and releasing your game in such a sorry state is just asking to get negative reviews and refunds.

Hopefully this game can recover and improve; I really wanted to play this but I don't wanna deal with a sub-par experience because of ineptitude from the devs.