Gundam Evolution Network Test Impressions

I’ve been looking forward to Gundam Evolution since it was first revealed last year. I enjoy the Gundam media that I’ve taken in and I used to play a lot of Overwatch so it seemed like it would be a match made in heaven for me. The F2P aspect also made me curious about how the game would be supported and monetized.

When it was announced at last month’s Sony State of Play that the game would be having a network test on Steam for both the Japan and US regions, I knew I had to check it out. With luck, my application for the test survived their lottery and I was able to experience it for myself. After spending a few days with the 14 available mobile suits, three game modes, and six maps, I’ve come away excited but also slightly worried.

Considering this was a network test, I feel like I should mention my experience with connection and such before breaking everything else down. I am happy to say that I only noticed a small bit of lag maybe once or twice throughout all the games I played over the weekend.

Outside of the practice and training modes, there was only the option to play in ranked matches. The good part of this was that everyone that joined a match was guaranteed to start at the beginning and not backfill for anyone. However, it was a little annoying at times, simply because if someone left a match or lost connection early on it would cancel the match and that happened quite a bit in my experience.

Getting into the meat of things, it’s best to talk about the Blizzard-sized elephant in the room first. From the initial trailer, it was incredibly apparent that there was a lot of influence from Overwatch. The most noticeable parallels are that the game is 6v6 and the UI looks incredibly similar, with some key changes here and there. You can take that comparison a step further because some of the mobile suits’ abilities do feel familiar to the heroes from Blizzard’s popular shooter. None are an exact copy, but you can certainly find elements of characters like Doomfist or Soldier: 76 spread out across this roster.

For what it’s worth, I think there are enough differences that help the game stand out in these similar situations. I felt like the small mid-screen notifications that pop up after killing enemies, for example, were less obtrusive than I was expecting. The ping system helps a lot with communication, especially when the selection of preset voices is interchangeable and free to customize per unit. Gameplay-wise, I felt like each mobile suit manages to incorporate understandable abilities while paying enough homage to what they can do from their own media.

Gundam Evolution differs further with most of its game modes. Point Capture is the only similar mode as it involves taking control of two capture points, one at a time. One team defends the points, one tries to capture them, and they both switch at the end of the round.

The second mode is Domination, which involves capturing and holding one of three objectives to fill up a capture meter. What shakes up this mode is that the objective players need to capture will randomly change to one of the others after a select amount of time. Lastly, there’s the Destruction mode. This involves an attacking team trying to set up “megacharges” at one of two objectives with the defending team trying to prevent this from happening or at least disarming these megacharges. If the attackers manage to blow up one of these objectives, they’ll then have to do it again between another pair of objectives to win.

Some unique mechanics greatly affect the gameplay, specifically in regard to the movement options you have. Each mobile suit has a thruster gauge that is split up into either one, two, or three bars. Tapping the thrust button will drain an entire bar and quickly boost you in the direction you’re moving. Holding it meanwhile will slowly deplete the thruster gauge but will move you along at a quicker pace than normal. The thruster gauge can also be used to keep you in a hover state in the air.

These movement options provide enough freedom for a lot of different situations. I had as much fun juking enemy attacks with boosts as I did with chasing enemies down in tight hallways. Using a mobile suit with great vertical options and then hovering and shooting at the enemy team from above always felt super satisfying. Though I wouldn’t recommend doing it too often.

Another unique mechanic is that taking an enemy’s health bar to zero doesn’t mean they’re out just yet. Instead, this will put them in a “disabled” state for a little bit. Although their timer to relaunch/respawn begins as soon as they enter this disabled state, an ally can come along and revive them to keep them in the fight. Players can prevent this from happening by damaging them more and fully destroying their mobile suit.

I found this to be an interesting extra layer to the gameplay. Most of the time it made sense to finish them off just in case they had a teammate nearby. The complication with this is that it can take a while because there is no general melee attack (which I didn’t like). When my team needed me to help defend a point or all of this was occurring during a large fight, the choice was less obvious. Conversely, there were plenty of times when I was able to revive a disabled teammate using the GM Sniper II’s long-range recovery gun or the Guntank’s high-speed recovery ability during some intense firefights.

Speaking of intense firefights, I do have to highlight the sound design. Whether you’re activating the Turn A Gundam’s HADES system, the quiet GM Sniper II’s Vulcan Pod, or simply shooting any weapon, it all sounds great. Everything you do sounds awesome and that is exactly what I want from a Gundam game.

This comes with the caveat that the game can sound extremely chaotic. I’m not sure if it was a bug or if it was because I had a moment to step back from the action, but I always noticed how loud everything was after being disabled or destroyed in a huge fight. At times it can be a bit of a sensory overload.

On the other hand, the visuals are hit and miss. All of the mobile units look great and the maps themselves are initially distinct enough to stand out. Unfortunately, even with the occasional armored car on the ground or building that you can jump on top of, there just isn’t enough to convey the sense of scale that you’re in a big mecha. Always being on the move and shooting things makes for even less time to appreciate the occasional details.

Compounding this more is that a lot of maps feature gigantic hallways and rooms. This does blend some maps together in my mind but more importantly, it doesn’t feel any different than navigating a normal-sized hallway in another shooter. I don’t think the solution to this would be to make smaller rooms, but simply show more evidence that humans exist at all. Providing way more vehicles, towers, or maybe some tiny bases would sell me that I’m piloting a mobile suit in a Gundam world. As is, it feels more like Transformers where you have big robots and similarly big objects they interact with.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy what I played. I felt like all three game modes were different enough and I think that number is a good amount to start with. After all, straight from the game’s website, we know that Gundam Evolution is a F2P game that promises “a continuous flow of new maps, units, customization items, and game modes.” Three modes are fine for now, but I do hope to see more in the future.

Where I strongly feel this sentiment is with the number of maps. I’m crossing my fingers that they decided to not show off all the maps because only having six of them wouldn’t be a great amount to launch with. I enjoyed learning about these maps, but just with my luck it felt like I kept getting the same four maps. A decent variance goes a long way and I think having an additional map for each mode to bring the total up to nine would do wonders.

When it comes to the number of mobile suits I also feel like it needs a tiny bit more. The network test featured twelve that were immediately available and two more that were unlocked with conveniently provided credits called Capital Points. Since the game is 6v6, it is very noticeable when you can see almost half of the roster just on your team alone in every match. Barring a lot of mirror picks on the enemy team, you’re likely to see two-thirds of the roster at least in every match too.

It seemed implied to me that the two extra mobile suits won’t be playable by default at launch either, because why else arbitrarily lock them behind points? According to a Twitter post, these points are earnable in-game. I never received any from my games and I was instead just provided with the perfect amount to unlock the two extras. Unless they just wanted players to go through the motions of unlocking something with these points, I’m assuming they’ll be locked at launch and twelve mobile suits might just be the starting roster.

It’s also a reasonable assumption that future mobile suits will be locked behind 2,000 capital points as well. I have no idea how easy or frequently one can earn this specific currency though. As such, I don’t know how feasible it will be to unlock new mobile suits to play.

What I am hoping for is that it compares favorably to the season pass and the gacha supply pod system. It felt easy to move through the season pass and it offered a lot of tickets to be used on supply pods which act as random loot boxes of cosmetic items.

Although I’m not crazy about loot boxes, I don’t have an issue when it’s just cosmetics. Moreover, I noticed that when I received a duplicate I was given an equal amount of Material Points as it costs to buy another item of that same rarity. This is compared to Overwatch, which gives you 1/5 the worth of credits for a duplicate, and this feels a whole lot more generous.

It also looks awesome to see the RX-78-2 Gundam smashing the supply pod in front of you every time you use a ticket. It is definitely my favorite animation for a loot box opening. However, that’s not something I want to praise because I know the tickets will be available for real money.

As to be expected with a lot of F2P games, there is a lot of potential here to make something really exciting. No mobile suit felt the same so trying them out and discovering which I liked to play was a ton of fun. A lot of the customization items looked great too. I’m hoping the season pass and supply pod system stays as generous as they were in this network test.

I can’t ignore the hiccups though. There’s an obvious lack when it comes to the sense of scale. Having no melee option is weird, especially given how many mobile units are known to have beam sabers. Twelve mobile suits and six maps feel too low to start with and I’m hoping there’s more there at launch. How steady and accessible the flow of post-launch content is will also have a big effect on how successful it remains.

Am I going to play this game when it comes out? Probably. I could see myself getting a little fatigued from it if they don’t bring in enough content, but it ticks a lot of boxes for me. It has a pretty strong foundation and I could look past some of the issues I had if they add more maps and fun mobile suits at a decent pace. For now, we’ll just all have to wait to learn more before it’s released later this year.