Wuthering Waves Review

ign.com:

Right from the start, Wuthering Waves’ odd mix of swords, guns, and spirits caught my eye, somehow combining disparate ideas into a combat spectacle. This story-driven gacha RPG will have you twirling like a ballerina to dodge attacks before passing the baton to a teammate that then slams the enemy with a fish-like dragon. Unfortunately, while those flashy, fast-paced fights and the exciting parkour-like movement quickly endeared Wuthering Waves to me, it also failed to impress in a few other key areas – including a lackluster story that sometimes tempted me to use the skip button.

Wuthering Waves is all about action. Every character has an element and weapon type associated with them, as well as individual skills that you can level up. However, how you use those characters isn’t quite a copy-paste of similar action-RPGs like Genshin Impact. That’s thanks in part to the intro and outro skills that can be used when you swap between each character in your three-person team, which activate cool special attacks like triggering a fire-infused shootout. You also charge up a separate skill gauge by dishing out damage or successfully dodging and parrying enemy attacks, and these systems add an appreciated layer of strategy to how you build your party and when exactly to change teammates.

Characters also have unique combos you can activate during combat, all of which you can practice in dedicated tutorials for each one. To use them, you might need to press the same button four times, press and hold a button after performing a different attack, or jump in the air for an aerial attack before activating an alternate combo. It can take a bit to memorize those inputs, but doing so for your favorite fighters makes using them even more satisfying. It’s nice that Wuthering Waves encourages you to try them all out at least once, too, even offering some small rewards for your trouble.

All that nuance makes combat a lot of fun, though it stumbles a bit with its element system, which