Source: Kuro Games
Wuthering Waves celebrates one month on 22 June since its launch, here’s what we think about it so far!
Wuthering Waves is Kuro Games’ second entry into the Gacha gaming sphere. Advertised as a story-rich, open world game with a focus on exploration and a Devil May Cry-like combat system, it was released 22 May after much hype by fans.
With Genshin Impact dominating the Gacha scene since its release in 2020, players who wanted a better experience looked towards WuWa as the fabled Genshin Killer.
…but Wuthering Waves is dangerously close to sinking the ship.
Admittedly, I have been a long time player of Genshin Impact, so my expectations of Wuthering Waves was reserved but hopeful. In the past 4 years of Genshin Impact being the top Gacha game in the market, it is the standard that I assume everyone looked towards when it came to gameplay and story.
But I found that Wuthering Waves’ story, something that was claimed to be rich and compelling, fell incredibly short to me. It felt like I was reading through some kind of incredibly bloated, jargon-infested script that offered me no further explanation or context. Immediately you are brought into the thick of things with lines and lines of tutorials that immediately take you away from your immersion.
The skip button, although something you normally wouldn’t want to press when the game has just started its first few scenes, was my friend…but only in the instances where it was available. Wuthering Waves skip mechanic is like a ghost that disappears from one scene to appear in the next, rendering you unable to breeze through uninteresting conversations between the characters. In the end, I was so bored out of my mind that I ended up leaving the story quest and roaming the map.
The map itself was a joy to explore, it is expansive, immersive, and boasts beautiful terrain and wondrous scenery that can be easily scaled with Wuthering Waves’ unique climbing animations (no longer will I be stuck on an awkward piece of rock that my character can’t easily jump over like in Genshin Impact!)
I also enjoyed the fact that you can gain Echoes of the Tacet Discord (WuWa’s equivalent to an enemy) like some kind of Pokemon, but with an honestly exhilarating and fun combat experience.
Wuthering Waves’ combat system isn’t locked behind a simplistic strategy of strings of burst and skill damage, dodging, and running like in Genshin Impact. WuWa allows players to enjoy a more complicated battle with counterattacks, parries, immobilizations, and even more strategies and combinations that can play to your chosen character teams’ strengths.
Oh, if only the mobile UI and camera controls were better. I found the screen too overcrowded, and during combat, I ended up getting lost in what buttons could do this or that. Given that the abundance of buttons comes with the various mechanics you can employ. The camera controls is a contentious enemy itself, being difficult to control when the battle gets exciting, and you’re lost trying to scramble your way to finding where your enemy ended up in. The lack of controller support also isn’t much of a comfort.
In terms of Gacha, Wuthering Waves doesn’t have any specific mechanic that can elevate it from the rest, but the abundance of free pulls was a joy. Indeed, Wuthering Waves’ gacha generosity in its first days was something to marvel at– but a bit of it did come at the expense of suffering from an unfortunate launch full of bugs and issues. Players complained of bugged out character screens, freeze-ups, and problems with the game launcher to name a few.
The free 5-star selector was probably the highlight of the launch freebies that didn’t come at the expense of Kuro Games appeasing unhappy players.
But what’s a free 5-star to do when you can’t keep your players invested in the story you want to tell?
You can temporarily appease your player base with beautiful character design, but at the end of the day, and like with many other Gacha games that tried to dethrone Genshin Impact, if the story isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, you might just end up falling from the sky like Icarus in the sea.