Wuthering Waves is an open world action RPG developed by Kuro Games. It follows the same style as other gatcha games, such as Genshin Impact and Tower Of Fantasy. Wuthering Waves hopes to carve out its niche with its faster-paced combat and spin on artifacts with a creature collecting system.
The World of Solaris-3
Your character, Rover, wakes up in Solaris-3 without their memories. Rover meets various characters along their journey, which helps them become established in the world. There was an event in the past called the Lament, an apocalyptic event that created these monsters called Tacet Discords, which you fight. The story’s first act establishes the world, various factions, and connects Rover to the history of Solaris-3.
Honestly, the start of the game is a bad first impression. A lot of the initial world-building felt like information overload, which caused me to zone out of what was happening at times. To add to these woes, some of the characters’ voice-acting and writing felt one-note, bland, and inconsistent with other characters. Some character’s personalities shined; others make you want to skip through the dialogue and get to the rest of the game.
Open World
While the story is underwhelming, exploring Wuthering Waves is a fun experience. There are loads of activities for players to get Astrites, the currency needed to obtain characters and weapons on the various banners. You can solve puzzles, complete time trials where you fight enemies, and even play mini-games. There is a currency called waveplates, the time-gated currency for certain activities. You have 240 waveplates, and one waveplate regenerates every six minutes. So the idea is you can log into the game once per day and spend the waveplates leveling up your characters and weapons without spending too much time on the daily grind. Each activity costs about 40 to 60 waveplates, which felt like I had enough to grind daily.
Solaris-3 has a lot of things to explore and collect, so the game gives you options to traverse it. Unlocking teleporters around will help you fast-travel to your destinations. You have a glider and grappling hook, which allow you to traverse gaps. The most interesting thing that Wuthering Waves added is how to scale cliffs. Sprinting at walls allows you to start running up walls. This feature made me happy, as other games like this can be tedious to scale cliffs. Exploration overall is fun, and there are various environments to explore.
Gotta Catch Them All?
One of my favorite parts about Wuthering Waves is the combat. You have teams of three characters, all with different elements. You can swap between the three characters when the situation suits that character the best. Each character has a skill and an ultimate ability. You have normal attacks, heavy attacks, and plunging attacks. However, things are faster and more fluid than Genshin Impact. One thing that sets it apart is the intro/outro skills. When a character swaps, they leave behind different abilities. Sometimes, you get stat boosts; sometimes, they deal damage after leaving the field. After charging up your character, swapping will lead to an intro attack. Overall, everything feels fast and has a higher skill ceiling.
The other unique thing about Wuthering Waves is its artifact system. When you defeat monsters in the overworld, you can absorb them, and they become echoes. Echoes give you stat bonuses. Having multiple of the same echoes in an echo set can grant bonus effects such as bonus elemental damage and other powerful effects. You have a data bank where you can record the echoes you collect, which will increase your stamina and get better echoes as you progress deeper into the game. While you can only collect all the echoes in your world once a day, you can visit other people’s worlds to continue the echo hunt. The downside is that you need a resource called tuners to roll substats, which can turn into the grindy, RNG-dependent nature of gatcha games. I enjoy that you are incentivized to go to other people’s worlds and co-op the game. I also like that you have more chances of getting a desired main stat for the echoes, but you’re still praying to get good substats for the characters.
It’s A Gatcha Game, After All
After collecting enough Astrites, you can spend them on various character and weapon banners to have a chance of getting the characters you want. The game starts with a beginner banner, which gives you a 5-star character and other goodies. From there, the game gives you the choice of a 5-star character to pull on, which will guarantee you that character. There is also the standard banner and a limited event banner, which rotates characters. You need about 1600 Astrites to pull ten times on normal banners. For event banners, you have a 50/50 chance of getting that event character. If you lose your 50/50 shot, you are guaranteed the event character the next time you pull a 5-star character. The maximum number of rolls you need to pull a 5-star event character is 80, less than Genshin Impact’s 90 pulls.
For transparency, I think my luck on the gatcha was pretty good. I obtained the best healer from my beginner banner, and thanks to some in-game mail, I could grab the best DPS at the start of the game. Each account will be different, and it’s important to gatcha responsibly. While I think this game is generous with rewarding you at the start of the game, I think it will still be a grind for free-to-play players to build up resources. Expect to plan carefully for future banners. I cannot predict the future, so while the rewards I got while playing the game are generous, I do not know if this will continue into the future.
A Long-Term Investment
Wuthering Waves is a free-to-play gatcha game. They want you to spend your time in their world and hopefully spend money on it. So, is Wuthering Waves worth playing? I think long-term, it is. Its combat is very solid, and the exploration aspect is also fun. Its biggest faults are the story, which is very weak, and the voice acting of some characters is subpar. To Kuro Games’ credit, they are working to address these issues. The game has been patched constantly since I started playing, and they are working to address the voice acting. If you’re looking for a fast-paced action game and a deep, open world, I recommend Wuthering Waves. If you’re more of a story person, maybe wait to see if the story improves.
