My Wuthering Waves 1.0 Impressions
(Unreal) Store Brand Genshin Impact (Or, Iteration is Pretty Okay)
Wuthering Waves, the new game from Chinese developer Kuro Games, is now finishing its 1.0 patch, and, as someone who has dabbled a little too much in the dark arts of gacha games recently (namely Hoyoverse, but that’s another topic), I felt compelled to try it. I’m pretty sure that’s a poor personal choice, but I’m good at those. That choice has been a fun one as of now, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on what I’ve played so far. I’ll include some screencaps and supporting images for some of the things I discuss.
First, a little background—despite my lifetime gaming, I’m not a super experienced gacha gamer. I think the model is exploitative garbage, but the character focus it promotes really scratches a particular itch for me. I really like getting attached to and building up individual characters, and I particularly enjoy these games as a space where female characters predominantly engage interpersonally with other female characters. That’s somewhat unique in mainstream gaming spaces, even now. Who it’s in service to oftentimes deserves interrogation, but that’s a can of worms for another time.
I started playing Honkai Star Rail about eight months ago, then Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd about a month or two after that, completing the (current) trio of available Hoyo titles. I also regularly, if with a lot less commitment, play Reverse 1999 from Bluepoch. I’ve bounced off a few other titles, so those are the ones that stuck. Star Rail is my favorite and highest priority of those four, followed by Impact 3rd and Genshin respectively, with Reverse much more casual and further behind. I’m regular about my dailies and progress in each.
Like I said, I’m good at bad decisions. So, I dove right into another.
It’s a Crowded Field
Inevitably, from its prerelease hype cycle to its launch and reviews, Wuthering Waves (hereafter WuWa for convenience) could not escape comparisons to the tyrant title of gacha, Genshin Impact. To some extent, that’s just the fate of any new gacha title—Genshin is the biggest, the most widespread, the most successful gacha game in the world, and it has been for some time. Any new gachas must navigate out from under its long shadow to survive, either through gameplay, aesthetics, or something else entirely.
Many titles set themselves apart with gameplay; gacha is a business model after all, not a genre unto itself, and though there are many shared conventions, gacha titles run the gamut of RPG styles. Hoyo’s own Honkai Star Rail homages turn-based RPGs. Arknights opts for tower defense. Fire Emblem Heroes mimics its singleplayer source’s strategy roleplaying. And on and on and on. There are plenty of titles to look to for examples.
Genshin dominates the market as an open-world action RPG, as gacha’s Breath of the Wild. You run around a large open map, opening six hundred million treasure chests and collecting half a billion more collectibles while questing through a sprawling and often infodumpy narrative. From what I’ve played so far (I’m taking a break on story progress after I finished Inazuma recently) it’s very fun, and I’ve loved it dearly. It’s not without its flaws, but Genshin Impact’s juggernaut status makes sense, and it’s hard to challenge, especially by doing the same things.
Which, of course, is exactly what Wuthering Waves does. It’s another open-world action RPG. You run around a large open map, opening six hundred million treasure chests and collecting half a billion more collectibles while questing through a sprawling and often infodumpy narrative. Although there’s less narrative to speak of since this is a new game.
What I’m saying is this—by design, Wuthering Waves invites comparison to Genshin Impact. One could reasonably call it a Genshin Clone. The genre is the same, the systems are the same, and the flow is very much the same as you explore and interact with the story and world. Even the controls, at least on PC where I play both titles, are identical. For better or worse, Kuro Games made WuWa very much in Genshin Impact’s exact mold, and it’s hard to leave a titan’s shadow when you wear the same shape. Imitators try and fail all the time, and they can only survive by their margins of difference.
Speed and Mobility Make a Difference
For Wuthering Waves, the difference is movement. It’s speed. WuWa plays much faster and more fluidly than Genshin, placing heavy emphasis on the pace and flow of navigating the environment. The game wants you to move, fast and frequently, with as few stops as possible.
Unlike Genshin, where sprinting always drains stamina, WuWa’s stamina meter does not deplete when sprinting out of combat (though naturally it does in combat, to give players another resource to manage). When you explore, you can run to your heart’s content. That doesn’t sound like much, but eliminating the tedious, frustrating downtime of waiting for stamina regeneration during extensive exploration adds up fast. Getting from Point A to B faster and without interruption matters, and it really smooths out and speeds up the exploration process.
This commitment to mobility extends to what I consider one of Genshin’s greatest bugbears—verticality. Simply put, climbing in Genshin is stiff, slow, clunky, and incredibly prone to physics jank. It slows the game down to a crawl for stretches that often end with the realization that the ledge at the top is too wide to surmount, or the path you chose just slightly overshot your stamina. You can tell Hoyo’s developers know just how bad it is because almost every region has an attempted solution for the problem of verticality, like Wind Currents in Mondstadt or Thunder Spheres in Inazuma. The game eternally needs mechanisms to make Getting Up There a faster and more interesting experience.
Wuthering Waves attacks this from go with its use of parkour. Rather than sprinting up to a cliff face, coming to a halt, and slowly creeping up (with the occasional jump to make the climb a little faster), your character transitions fluidly to wallrunning, speedily rushing up and across vertical surfaces without losing your sense of momentum. Climbs that would take the better part of a minute in Genshin are surmounted in seconds. And instead of being stopped at the top of your climb by a ledge protruding a couple inches too far, your character can flip over it with hardly a pause.
Added to that, WuWa makes a good call for mobility by lifting the Thunder Sphere tether mechanic from Genshin’s Inazuma and simply making it a part of the base movement kit as a grappling hook. It functions identically to its predecessor for the most part but can also be used midair while gliding to save a little stamina and gain some elevation without losing forward momentum. Combined with the addition of double jumps, players get a nice uptick in aerial maneuverability and control. Adjusting midflight is an option in WuWa in ways it can’t be, for the most part, in Genshin, and that lets you stick some landings you might otherwise miss.
It all feels very intuitive, if superhuman, and flows well, so that when you’re moving you never really have to slow down or stop. Being able to move more dynamically and fluidly is just fun, even without considering the details of how it affects exploration.
I really notice the difference coming back to Genshin; climbing and moving about just feel so sluggish and stop-start comparatively. I view every cliff face with a little more dread than before, and every objective marker far from a teleporter feels a marathon away.
That’s just a little bit exaggerated, but only just. I still enjoy exploring Genshin, but there’s this little voice in the back of my mind when I play now that says that things could be sped up and smoothed out. I’ve seen the future, and it can be hard to come back from that.
How It Moves is How it Fights
It’s not just the movement that’s similar between WuWa and Genshin. Combat works on very similar gameplay axes, with both games placing significant emphasis on swapping through parties with interlocked synergy. Both games divide character actions between Basic Attacks, skills (Resonance Skills, in WuWa’s parlance), and ultimates (Elemental Bursts in Genshin and Resonance Liberations in WuWa) and keep much the same on-field flow.
However, where Genshin’s four-character parties tend to revolve around producing elemental reactions through combined character skills and attacks (for example, applying Hydro with a Hydro character then swapping to a Cryo character to apply the Frozen effect), WuWa focuses more on chaining together your party trio of characters’ Intro and Outro skills. Combat operates at a slightly faster pace, and character swaps revolve more around imparting buffs to your next characters than matching and combining elements.
In this, WuWa resembles Genshin’s predecessor, the more character action focused Honkai Impact 3rd, where QTE swapping and exchanging onfield buffs is very much the name of the game. Both HI3rd and WuWa emphasize timed dodging in combat to gain more power and open windows of opportunity to strike back at enemies, with WuWa adding an extra wrinkle in timed counterattacks, encouraging you to pay attention to big enemy swings and attack back at the right moment to make even bigger openings.
Comparatively, Honkai Impact 3rd operates at a much faster, more frenetic pace, with more buttons to press, combos to memorize, and effects to parse for each character. After about half a year of playing, I still don’t have any idea what’s happening on my screen about a third of the time. It takes a few repetitions, some skill reading, and a lot of muscle memory buildup to figure everything out. And sometimes I still miss entire mechanics for absurdly long stretches (Herrscher of Finality Kiana’s Absolute Time Fracture eluded me for literal months, because I apparently can’t read… And I realize how embarrassingly in the weeds this aside is).
WuWa is still fast but keeps things simpler and clearer, at least at this stage of its life cycle. There’s plenty of room for speed, mobility, and visual effects creep, but for the most part things are restrained and easy to parse.
Ultimately, WuWa falls somewhere in the middle of Genshin Impact’s and Honkai Impact 3rd’s combat systems—Genshin’s layout and controls but faster, HI3rd’s swapping and tempo but more methodical. There’s a specific sort of rhythm for each unique team in combat that fits nicely with the game’s musical names for combat systems (Concerto Skills, Forte Circuit to name a couple) and gives WuWa’s combat a texture and feel that’s both familiar and subtly distinct.
While I still feel like I’m learning systems and how things interlock, I’ve enjoyed WuWa’s combat so far. My current core of Yinlin (somewhat off-role as an onfield DPS), Sanhua (off-field sub-DPS), and Verina (sustain support) feels strong and engaging to play, at least, and I look forward to integrating Jinhsi in 1.1 if I can. It feels like there’s a lot of definition to how characters fit together right now, and there’s plenty of room for new options in those systems in the future.
Similitude in Systems
Beyond exploration and combat, most of Wuthering Waves’ systems map nearly 1:1 onto those of titles like Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. Different types of weapons can be found, crafted, or pulled in the gacha, just like weapons in Genshin or Light Cones in Star Rail. Characters and weapons require a multitude of different farmable resources to level up, ascend to new tiers, or unlock new skills and abilities.
Even the additional modes and challenges follow the same patterns. The Tower of Adversity mimics Genshin’s Spiral Abyss and Star Rail’s Memories of Chaos. The Illusive Realm mirrors Star Rail’s Simulated Universe and HI3rd’s Elysian Realm.
Most of this stuff is gacha game standard, not unique to Hoyo titles by any means, and WuWa doesn’t attempt to make any significant departures in that regard.
The multi-piece, set-based Echo system matches Genshin’s Artifacts and Star Rail’s Relics, but the combination of flavor and acquisition really help to distinguish it from its peers. Enemy monsters, called Tacet Discords, sometimes drop Echoes, which in-world are essentially copies or imprints of their power.
Mechanically, Echoes are equipment pieces that can combine into more powerful sets to grant your characters stat boosts. You can farm them from specific nodes, as in Genshin or Star Rail, or you can get them from enemies in the overworld, dropping at random in the type of whichever monster you just killed.
In essence, this is just standard loot drops; WuWa just makes them more granular by making monsters a type of equipment in themselves, but I do think the flavor of hunting down certain monster types to farm their Echoes is a great way to frame an old mechanic and make it feel fresh.
It’s fun flavor to tell yourself you’re hunting Impermanence Herons to use their souls for battle. WuWa does a good job leaning into that flavor by pushing the Data Bank, an encyclopedia-style progression system with completion awards for farming and collecting as many Echo types as possible, which helps even more to distinguish Echoes from more standard loot systems.
What adds to this baseline is the addition of skills tied to your character’s primary Echo. Much like Weapon Skills in Honkai Impact 3rd, Echoes’ skills add another button to your characters’ combat options, granting them new tools to absorb or deal damage by taking the form of the original monster. That Impermanence Heron you hunted now lets you fly into the air and rain fire down on the battlefield. These powers can significantly affect your characters’ powerlevel, timings, and skill rotations (especially with some of the fast swap-cancel moves you can pull off), and they promise to add a lot of nuance to character building as more options are added to the game.
Looks are Important, Too.
Moving away from comparisons, I think WuWa’s aesthetics are clean. The game is quite pretty on a graphical level and is a higher fidelity product than other options out there. On release there were marked issues with slow texture loading and pop-in, but those have mostly been resolved at this point. Some NPCs remain a little muddy and undercooked, though. They get a little bit into the “indistinct features of a melting Ken doll” territory sometimes.
In terms of visuals, I think WuWa’s competent and pretty, if a little generic at times. Regular humanoid NPCs and enemies don’t particularly stand out. They’re basically just the Mean Red Ones, the Mean Brown Ones, and the Blue Ones Who Are Friendly. While that’s a normal thing for gachas especially, I do think they could use some visual pop with their humanoids, or at least some distinction to feel less generic.
Monstrous enemy designs stand out more, though the mooks still look somewhat generic, mixing natural-esque creatures like grotesque herons and bears with tiny sprites and gremlins, warped, unnatural horrors, and even some technological monstrosities like tanks and spiderlike cars. There’s a lot of variety with the Tacet Discords. It feels like Kuro put a bit of care into making them look interesting and distinct, and their silhouettes differ enough to identify rapidly in more frenetic combat situations.
The game’s environments so far range through your standard mountain-swamp-desert-plains-coastlands-etcetera biomes and are for the most part competent, if not quite standout. For the most part, even the more mundane zones are nicely vibrant, full of satisfying pops of color and life.
Some areas, though, like the Port City of Guixu with its ruined floating highways and buildings, or the main hub in Jinzhou with its sleek, futuristic aesthetic, really stand out from the crowd, and even the more functional zones have their moments of beauty. Kuro makes sure you won’t miss them with Viewpoint spawns to fill what’s effectively a collectible scrapbook as you journey through Jinzhou. It’s not the worst way to make a completionist stop and smell the roses.
Especially When It Comes to Characters
With WuWa being a gacha game, though, every visual aspect pales in importance compared to the one absolute, unyielding essential: character design. More than powerlevel, more than mechanics, more than meta or compositional needs, gacha games live and die by getting their players irrationally bonded with their characters as fast as possible, to a frankly absurd degree. Visual first impressions can be make or break here, and I think WuWa does a solid job here.
The initial cast is built around the current regional setting, which is to say Chinese-inspired aesthetics (bar a couple exceptions in the likes of Encore and Verina), and it hits all the standard notes. In the free initial party, there’s Chixia, the spunky genki girl and novice patroller, Yangyang, the stable, demure Ranger, and Baizhi, the cold and composed but secretly caring researcher. It’s very much playing the hits in that regard, but the characters are charming and visually distinct enough to stick out.
Our main character, Rover (I picked femRover, because why would I choose otherwise?), is appealing and unique, rendered in blacks, greys, and golds, a color trio that reminds me immediately of Star Rail’s protagonist Stelle. She’s unique among the cast and pops nicely in a setting where she could very easily feel quite generic. Her golden eyes and the white streak in her hair give her a nice little pop that helps her stand out. I do wish she had a little more of her own personality to play with; compared to Stelle’s prevailing unhinged goofball energy in Star Rail, Rover can feel a little flat. That said, she’s still a nice self-insert perspective character with room to grow if Kuro’s willing to give her some more solid characterization.
Beyond that, the Standard Banner is populated by a variety of visually appealing characters, from Jianxin, a young monk on her first journey to the outside world, to Verina, a young girl with flower powers from another land, to Lingyang, a little animal dude complete with poofy ears and a tail. Everyone is very pretty and appealing, as is gacha standard, and they really wear their charm on their sleeves. They have clean, sharp animations, and it’s easy to parse what they bring to the table as you play them. You can kind of see what each character is about just by looking at them, and, especially at early stages like this, that’s probably a good thing.
The limited banner additions, Jiyan and Yinlin, have markedly more going on in the visual and effects department, as should be expected—they’re meant to be moneymakers, after all. I’ve not engaged with Jiyan past the trial for some free currency (20 crystals isn’t much, but it’s enough for two minutes). Yinlin, though, has been a fixture for me since she dropped, and I think her black and red colors combine nicely with radiant purple lightning animations to make an appealing and vivid character. Plus, her distinct elfin ears are a nice touch.
Generally speaking, I think WuWa’s characters so far are visually solid, if not anything spectacular. They’re pretty, readable, and distinct, and that should be enough for many players to bond with at least a couple on sight. The limited characters released so far have leveled up nicely in the visual design department, which bodes well for future designs, hopefully.
With that positivity in mind, I have one key negative. I would like to revoke WuWa’s jiggle physics privileges until such a time that they have learned to use them with restraint and composure. Seriously, it’s absurd. For some of the bustier female characters, like the aforementioned Baizhi or Taoqi, if you switch to their profile in the character screen their chests will wobble and shudder like water beds until the end of time. It’s excessive and not really a good look on any level, and I struggle to understand the appeal of making things that way. I know it’s horny-bait for someone, but it really doesn’t look anything but weird.
There’s a Story to Be Told
I want to touch briefly on the story. I’ll avoid spoilers, though I must admit I don’t have a ton of spoilers to give. I play open world games like this wrong. Like, I play them as an absolutely deranged completionist, with checklists and interactive maps to find every single explorable and collectible around before I even consider progressing the story through a new area. Just look at the fruits of my unhinged labor.
With that in mind, I’ve finished about half of what the 1.0 story has to offer, and a few side quests on top of that. It’s fairly standard fare, which is a refrain I find myself coming back to a lot here.
In short: Rover is an amnesiatic outsider who appeared from nowhere, with no warning, in Jinzhou after an enigmatic cutscene only we see. Rover is special. She doesn’t know why or how she’s special, but a higher power said she’s special. Everyone tells Rover she’s special, and all sorts of factions want to use her mysterious specialness to their own ends. Mystery and conflict ensue.
Again, at its core this is very standard self-insert, chosen hero style plotting. I’ve found it rather silly and excessive just how immediately welcoming and full of praise everyone is for Rover, who is, again, a mysterious stranger who appeared from nowhere and seems destined to upend the status quo. It feels very much like every character is on the verge of shouting “Welcome Protagonist!” at every turn, which gets a bit corny really fast.
WuWa’s side quest stories have been serviceable as well, if occasionally let down by some shaky translations. Each zone in Jinzhou has a story to tell in its exploration quest, and minor sidequests have actually been some of my favorite storytelling beats so far. I was immediately charmed by one quest purely about mountain climbing as a vehicle for a minor NPC’s sense of motivation and self-worth, but not all side quests are up to that standard.
In all, I wouldn’t say this is a terrible base to build from or anything, but it’s nothing I’ve not seen before, and at this stage I wouldn’t consider WuWa’s story a help or a hinderance in particular. It’s okay, and hopefully it can get better. Maybe it already has, and I just haven’t gotten there yet. We’ll see going forward.
It’s Still a Gacha Game, So What Can We Get For Free?
I do feel like I should note the reward structure as a point in WuWa’s favor as well. As you might expect for a new gacha, the rewards have been quite generous so far, especially in compensation for bugs and issues. Between standard pulls, limited pulls, and crystals, I think I’ve totaled something like 300+ in 1.0 without any significant investment. That’s not too bad, all things considered, though of course I’d expect those rewards to dry up a little as the game matures. Such is the nature of the format. There’s a reason why the best time to dive into one of these games is around the release period.
Conclusions
In short, should you give Wuthering Waves a try? Maybe. If you like gacha games, it feels like a solid start for a new entry in the space, if one that veers a bit generic sometimes and struggles to fully escape the shadow of competing titles like Genshin Impact. Combat and movement are where Wuthering Waves sets itself apart, so if you’re a crunchy, gameplay focused player there’s a lot to like here and some real promise going forward. It’s very fresh, active, and fast, which is a great change of pace from other competing titles. Otherwise, it’s a bit of a wait and see with some promising bones but niggling problems, which isn’t a horrible place to be for a new title.
There’s some stuff I didn’t get into here, like the audio (it’s solid), music (it’s pleasant and ambient, though I can’t say I’ve had anything stand out tremendously), and the voice acting (the English dub is solid most of the time, though it’s definitely had its shaky or outright bad moments in my estimation), mostly because I don’t have a ton to say at this stage.
I’ll certainly keep playing for a while to see where things go, and I might have more to say as the game continues to develop. So far, at least, I’m having fun, and that’s enough for me.
Goodbyes and Future Plans
If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading! This was just a loose collection of thoughts and impressions that ballooned a little more than I expected it to. Hopefully there was something useful or interesting in there.
I intend to write more here, definitely on gaming, but also on whatever catches my interest at any given time. There’s all sorts of interesting stuff to talk about, and I will if I think I have something to share. I’ll probably give Hoyo’s upcoming ZZZ a try, and we’ll see if I have thoughts. I might even post some of my fiction, if the mood takes me. We’ll see!
For now, the intention is to post here once or twice a week, and we’ll see where that takes us.
Have a lovely day!