This game popped up in my updates bar in my library and it's been 2 years since I played it apparently. I scrolled through the list of updates since I last played... There's about 30 WIP updates (previews of upcoming content) and 2 actual game updates. The 2 game updates were each a year apart from their previous update. So to clarify there's been 2 updates in the past 2 years and content that was teased before the first update didn't make it into the game until the second.

If you invest in this game you'll be waiting a year between updates and everything teased before that point isn't guaranteed to be in the update.

I get the impression the developer loves the sound of his own voice. Each WIP teaser comes with an essay and tonnes of screenshots. After each game update, the next post in the feed is an "afterwords" essay from the developer describing their thoughts on the process. I think it's a red flag if the developer talks about "heated discussions" from their discord server. This is usually a sign of the playerbase asking for changes and the developer arguing against it. You will also encounter the developer's love of their voice in the poorly written story. The game tells you what you feel and how you react because it's being told from a first person perspective, so there are creepy moments where you are eavesdropping or "overhearing" conversations from the female only support cast...

The mechs look absolutely fantastic and there's a near infinite number of combinations... These are bound by a very bland and small set of animations during combat. Parts are also locked behind an equally bland and boring grind. Furthermore, instead of using the awesome mechs as enemies you get the Quarks. An equally bland race of enemies that are multiplied and become bullet sponges as a way to increase difficulty. The objectives in the missions vary from "kill everything" to "kill everything faster" and my favourite "kill everything while staying here". There is of course the fan favourite "kill everything till you die" mode. All of which would be fine if it wasn't boring repetitive gameplay.

Now that Armored Core 6 has been released don't bother with M.A.S.S. unless you like looking at a single mech you've created and that's it. The Dynasty Warriors Gundam series has much better combat with your favourite Gundams which you're probably gonna try to recreate in M.A.S.S anyways.

Pros: Customization on every limb and weapons. That's it.


Cons:
Gameplay: Gets boring after some time. Getting new parts is a real grind and the difficulty, so to speak, doesn't really make the A.I. smart. The real "difficulty" is that they spawn in droves, and no matter how fast your mech is, some gorilla-looking Homunculi is right behind you and will slap you the moment you stopped boosting (or run out of boost)

Customization: No part really serves a purpose except for cosmetics (even the gun parts) and each part can only have up to 6 custom parts, which isn't really a lot.

Moving the parts is a huge pain because when you click where you want to place the custom part, it changes alignment you can only rotate using a slide bar. Moving the part on X,Y,Z axis requires the patience of a monk because the axis guide don't mean ♥♥♥♥ in this game.

Also, they added tank tracks as a "custom part" What do you want us to do with that? Place it on the legs and pretend that we're Gun Tanks?

Plot: Humans get slapped down to the underground by aliens. Humans made robots and fight the aliens. That's it. I stopped caring after the first cliche.

Update frequency: Early Access since the Genesis of the Universe. They post updates every now and then, but so far, we are yet to get a good update this year.

TL;DR - The greatest mech customization I have ever seen, leading into an overwhelmingly disappointing and stale combat system.

Melee is quite bad. It is an entirely one-button combat system. Go in, swing a few times, and back out before they counter-hit. There are no combos, no special attacks, no ground-to-air transition hits, no defensive options at all, no dodge, no parry, and there's only a block if you have a one-handed weapon and bring a shield. It only reduces damage, not blocks it.

Ranged does not fair much better. As you wrestle with Ocarina of Time's Z-Targeting, expect to spend an entire magazine to kill something, as enemies are spongy. Very spongy. Bosses are even worse. No idea if two-handed weapons do more damage than one-handed, but I used two-handed due to the massive amount of health they have after the first few missions. There's a difference between physical and energy damage. What that difference is, I do not know. The game never explained why you would use one over the other. Enemies have different elemental weaknesses, but the game also does not tell you what enemies you're going to be facing in a mission, so this is a useless mechanic unless you're replaying missions and happen to remember.

Bosses are awful. Get ready to slog through the same mechanic 30 times. Slowly chipping away their health in the meantime. Don't bother killing the adds, because they are unlimited and a replacement will immediately spawn after you kill one, if you're ranged, they will respawn before you can even reload. It takes genuinely forever to make the slightest progress. First you have to break the bosses constant shield that constantly regenerates, then you're actually doing damage. If you went ranged, the first non-tutorial bosses is your hard-counter. It has a constant unbreakable shield that blocks ranged attacks. I went hard into melee, but the boss was still unbelievably annoying. You're going to have a terrible time either way.

This game could be unstoppable. The best gundam game, the best armored core game, the best mech game, etc. It just needs a focused and targeted development strategy on the combat mechanics, some reworks, etc. It has a lot of potential, and the only reason this review is so long is because I want it to get there.