Kuro Games’ Wuthering Waves was released last week, May 23, 2024. With over 30 million pre-registrations and reaching the No. 1 spot for downloads in multiple regions, the anticipated game has a lot of expectations placed on it. After a week, how is the experience playing the newly launched game?
We played on our Samsung Galaxy Flip 4 using the default system settings on the South East Asia Server.
Wuthering Waves Post-Launch
Wuthering Waves has had a pretty noticeable rough launch. Reports were coming in of players unable to log in, glitches, and audio problems. Kuro Games has been issuing apologies for the post-launch states. Other aspects may improve over time, namely the lip-sync and voice acting. Despite this, the game is playable but still needs polish.
Launching Wuthering Waves requires a 12 GB download, though every update we’ve faced gave it an additional 100-200 MB per download. Setting up an account was also simple as we could use our Google Accounts. On the SEA server, we were experiencing 200ms of ping on our end regularly for the first 3 days. After a few updates, the signal improved to a comfortable 80-90ms. On 30 FPS, the was able to handle the massive overworld with a few hiccups. The significant dips in framerate and quality were when we were in a highly populated part of town or a graphics-intensive area such as the Sea of Flames.
So far, the game crashed twice during our playthrough, once after about 1 hour in and the other after a cutscene in the Sea of Flames. Both times, we were able to restart right where we left off. Notable bugs we encountered were blocks that we had to pick up not being selectable and a few assets not loading correctly.
If you’ve played similar games in the past, such as miHoYo’s Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, it’ll feel familiar. The UI, the gameplay loop, and structure is what is expected of genre. We kept this in mind as we were playing, but we also approached the game as if we never played a mobile game like this before.
Roving Around
As we stepped into Wuthering Waves we were greeted with an impressive graphical showcase of Kuro Games’ Talent in graphics and animation. The in-game graphics were up to the standards of the genre. Although, we did notice how small the text looked when the choices were written to be long. It took us only about an hour or so before we could finally roam about.
As we used our touchscreen controls, we got had to get use to the games unique mechanics. The grapple hook is something you’ll be using a lot, but the controls take some getting used to. Most of the time, we found ourselves falling down as getting the next grapple point wasn’t a guarantee. We would recommend playing this game on a controller.
The draw for the game has been its combat system. Battling Tacet Discords has been really engaging with the mechanics emphasizing parrying and dodging. During combat, we found the lock-on system better for 1-on-1 encounters than with mobs. The character switching being used for additional combos is quite a sight to behold when you’re able to use all 3 characters at once. One thing that really impressed me was the monster collecting aspect. Defeated Tacet Discords can be collected and be used for battle. These were fun combo extenders that make a significant impact in damage output and had neat effects that playable characters didn’t have.
What we can say about the story from first few hours, its been pretty so-so. Lots of mysterious pasts, puzzling terminologies, and colorful characters showing up. Rover at least speaks a few times. It’s more about the world and characters you meet that make the experience. Of course, the characters you get as well.
Did the Gacha Gods Bless us?
Being a Gacha game, we had to try our luck in getting the coveted 5-star characters. The first Convene came with a guaranteed 5-star character after 50 pulls. It took us 4 days to grind the required Lustrous Tides for those pulls. Doing quests, receiving in-game rewards, and bonuses from Kuro Games, were enough to support getting that roll. Lingyang was the first 5-star we got and he’s been wrecking Tacet Discords. The Liondancer from Jinzhou was capable of high damage with just his Resonance skill. A just in time too! Cause we just finished his in-game quest and he was a pretty cool guy.
As much as we wanted to buy Lustrous Tides, we wanted to be F2P for as long as possible. The Radiant Tides given as an apology was nice, so we decided to just give it a roll. On the first roll using the Radiant Tides, we got Jiyan! The General of the Midnight Rangers lived up to his name both in cutscenes and in game play. The damage output did not lie as he was able to solo our entire team through entire mobs. His crowd control and AoE skills made the combat click for us, as now we had enough characters to power through the game.
Is it worth playing Wuthering Waves?
In conclusion, if you’ve never played the open-world gachas before, Wuthering Waves is a fine choice with an intriguing battle system and lots of promise. Now if you’re already playing different games, there might not be enough to convince you to switch games. We’ll have to see if Kuro Games can keep up interest in the long term. We’d recommend waiting for a few updates to smooth over the rough edges, but if you’d like to play it now, there’s no harm if you’d like to step into the world of Solaris-3.
We give it a 2.5 out of 4 stars for the version currently available.
Wuthering Waves is available on PC, Android, and iOS devices.
