After the meteoric rise of Genshin Impact, it stands to reason that games would come along trying to take a piece of the very profitable pie that Genshin Impact has. Wuthering Waves appeared to be just that, honestly without much effort to create its own identity outside of being labeled a Genshin Impact clone. When it launched, May 23rd, I was curious to see if it could keep me longer than Genshin Impact had. 

Wuthering Waves made a decent first impression, a cinematic opening that raises plenty of questions, a quick introduction to your main story companions, and of course, an amnesiac blank slate protagonist. It lets you explore and start dabbling in combat pretty quickly, alongside some quick tutorials, but it felt fairly intuitive, it was also pretty much things I had seen before. 

Unfortunately, one of the first things I noticed was the game really didn’t seem to run that well. I figured it was just launch issues, I was playing it day one after all. It turns out the launch of this game was rather rocky, and my technical issues seemed exceedingly minor compared to some others that I saw. I mostly had frame drops and some stuttering, but others reported hard crashes and gameplay breaking bugs. 

Next came the first boss fight of the game. It was nice and cinematic, and tried to introduce a few new combat mechanics at the same time. At this point I was basically just button mashing though, which was more than enough to carry me through this fight. I could already begin to see that combat had more moving parts than Genshin Impact though. On the other hand, this is where the story lost me. 

Mobile gacha games are pretty infamous for having too many proper nouns, and devolving into a word salad very quickly. This game was a huge offender in this regard. Every other line was throwing out terms I either didn’t know or couldn’t remember. It didn’t help that the English voice acting was wooden at best and grating at worst. I usually don’t play mobile games for the story, and usually begin to skip it whenever possible within the first hour of play. 

Though, strangely this trend has been broken in my ongoing love affair with Honkai Star Rail. I really dug the first arc, got pretty lost in the second, and felt the latest story arc was really strong. It’s got too many proper nouns and factions for sure, but the characters are compelling and it’s delivered in an enjoyable way. Sadly, none of that seemed to be present in Wuthering Waves. 

Since I’d already checked out of the story, and felt exceedingly little charm from the characters, it was solely up to the gameplay to keep me interested. Once I played a little more and got my third character, I could really start to see this game sing. It doesn’t have a role or element system to serve as an overarching gameplay framework, instead, it leans into frenetic combat that rewards proper timing and character swapping. 

When you swap a character into combat, the current character has an exit skill, and the entering character has an intro skill. The onfield character also gets to finish their current attack, so swapping at the right time allows you to finish a big attack while already lining up your next move. There are also perfect dodges and parries that force you to pay more attention to your opponent and the battlefield. 

On top of this, you have the echoes system, where you summon or transform into a monster to do another attack or skill. Between skills, ultimates, dodges, parries, character swapping, and the echoes system you have a lot of options and things to juggle. It’s really quite the fun dance once it gets going. The only problem is that I don’t play on PC, and the only other option is playing this on my phone, which very quickly makes my hands hurt. Thus, it was time to buy a mobile controller. 

I’d heard of mobile controllers for a while, and given how often I find myself playing games on my phone, I think it was high time I got one for myself. I wasn’t certain how it would work with this game, as I’d never had a mobile controller before, but I was fairly confident that it would at least be an improvement over touchscreen controls. 

After some quick research on what would be the best fit for me, I decided to buy the GameSir G8 Galileo Mobile Controller. The size was adjustable so I knew it would fit my phone, it was a little big, but I doubted I would really be using it outside my house. It wasn’t too expensive, and I didn’t have many other games on my radar lately, so I figured it would be worthwhile to check it out. 

It was easy to slot my phone in, but getting the set up going took a bit of work. In my head this was a magical device that I just plugged in and all of a sudden it worked, which of course it didn’t. I had to download an app called GameSir, which had a 2 star rating on google play. Alarm bells started going off immediately. The app seems to crash a lot when the controller isn’t plugged in, and has other weird technical issues. 

But, I got it to launch my games through the app, and noticed it worked, sorta. There’s a handful of mobile controller supported games, like Genshin Impact, which support the controller without any extra setup (I think). For games that don’t support mobile controllers, it takes a bit more doing. You essentially map areas of the touch screen to different buttons on the controller. So when you press a button, it “taps” that area of the touchscreen. 

I started trying to map out the touchscreen to various buttons on the controller, but then found that people in the community can make their layouts available for other users. So I grabbed the layout from another user, and with a few tweaks, I could play the game pretty well! If I wanted to navigate the menus I had to switch to just using the touchscreen, but the combat I could at least play using the controller. 

After all this work though, I still didn’t find the game really clicked with me. I had gotten into the daily mission / grind loop, and as fun as the combat was, there wasn’t enough to keep me hooked. Genshin Impact I had the combat and the characters. Honkai Star Rail I have the characters, combat, teambuilding, and even the story. Wuthering Waves really only seemingly had combat going for it, and I’m not sure if that’s enough to keep me hooked on a gacha game anymore. 

It doesn’t help that Zenless Zone Zero, miHoYo's latest game, which is also an action focused gacha game, comes out in July. Given miHoYo’s track record, I think that game will just likely be at a higher quality than Wuthering Waves. It’s too bad though, I wanted Wuthering Waves to be good, to help create a little more competition in the gacha game space. 

I haven’t returned to Wuthering Waves since the week it came out, and I really haven’t messed around with my mobile controller much either, but I can see myself finding some future uses for it. While Wuthering Waves didn’t quite hit for me, I’m glad I tried out using a mobile controller. It takes some doing; but it makes playing phone games a lot more comfortable. 

Maybe with some smart updates and technical fixes Wuthering Waves will get even better, it definitely has a good foundation. It just felt uninspired in some key areas that really didn’t endear me to the game, its setting, or its characters. If I don’t care about the characters, the loop of trying to pull for new characters to use in combat really begins to fall apart. 

If combat is really all you need to get into a game, Wuthering Waves might be your perfect fit. I used to think that was enough to get me into a good gacha game, but after being spoiled by Honkai Star Rail, I’m not sure I feel the same. Gacha games are designed for you to play every single day, and if I’m going to spend every day in a game, I want to make it one I like spending time in. Outside of the combat, I never really enjoyed my time in Wuthering Waves, and that’s really too bad.