Wuthering Waves is an open-world action RPG set in a hostile world trying to fight against the Tacet Discords. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth playing.

Wuthering Waves Review Video

Wuthering Waves Review Overview

What is Wuthering Waves?

In Wuthering Waves, you take on the role of a mysterious newcomer simply known as the "Rover." Waking up without any memories or connections and in a world beset by creatures known as Tacet Discords, they must navigate the war-torn landscapes, underground factions, and roaming monsters to find the truth about themselves and the world.

Wuthering Waves features:
　⚫︎　Varied Skill Conditions
　⚫︎　Different team archetypes
　⚫︎　Large open world
　⚫︎　Skill cut-ins
　⚫︎　Quality of life features for exploration
　⚫︎　Material farming independent of stamina
　⚫︎　Character gacha
　⚫︎　Guaranteed weapon banner

For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Wuthering Waves' gameplay and story.

Mobile App Store Pages
App Store			Google Play
Other Platforms
Epic Games			Dedicated Client

Wuthering Waves Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Highly Technical Combat Awesome Team Building Design Easy Pre-Farming Elegant and Practical Visuals Convenient Map Tools Captivating Cutscenes	Story Opens Terribly Banal Daily Quests Gacha Is Punishing Intensely Grindy Post-Game

Wuthering Waves Overall Score - 82/100

Wuthering Waves is an absolutely captivating game that's only somewhat dragged down by its subpar prologue. While it is entirely possible to enjoy it after getting past the heavy gates of its boring opening acts, it will definitely come with a severely damaged first impression. Otherwise, it is perhaps the best game of its kind on mobile, boasting an incredible combat system, story, audiovisuals, and cast.

Wuthering Waves Story - 6/10

Unfortunately, the opening act of Wuthering Waves’ story is an utter snoozefest. The development doesn’t make sense, and the delivery can easily knock you out of the game. Practically every side quest is also atrociously boring. However, the game manages to find a well-rounded pace later on, without having to juggle screen time between major characters. It even has some very powerful and captivating scenes, typically at the end of its story arcs.

Wuthering Waves Gameplay - 10/10

Everything about Wuthering Waves’ gameplay was designed with momentum in mind. Not only is its combat fast-paced and unrelenting, but even the way the characters are designed to navigate the terrain allows them to move quickly and smoothly. Strict timing is required for certain core mechanics, which reward players based on their skill. If taken to the extreme, a perfect match is a cinematic experience of its own. On the other hand, the vast majority of side and daily quests are utterly mundane in terms of their gameplay. Thank god all of them can either be skipped for the loot or ignored altogether.

Wuthering Waves Visuals - 10/10

Watching Wuthering Waves’ combat is almost like watching an action movie. The developers' decision to keep the cut-ins short ties in extremely well with the momentum the game tries to maintain. In exchange, the visual effects are highly satisfying without creating much clutter on the screen. The character designs and model quality are also very good with an abundance of, ahem, fanservice.

Wuthering Waves Audio - 7/10

The directional audio of Wuthering Waves, particularly mid-combat, is an action enthusiast’s dream. The sound effects hit hard, almost making you feel like you’re partaking in the action. On the other hand, the BGM is completely forgettable. Honestly, you might be better off playing the PGR OST on the background. The voice acting is also only excellent on very specific characters, while its absence on side quests makes them even more lifeless.

Wuthering Waves Value for Money - 8/10

While Wuthering Waves’ character gacha is the industry-standard disappointment, its weapon gacha is a safe haven for equipment collectors eager to gear their team with the best money (or lack of it) can buy. On top of that, many of Wuthering Waves’ quests are quite rewarding, and exploration is highly incentivized with decent loot and fun locations.

Wuthering Waves Full Review: Magnificence Hidden By Tiresome Narratives

I’ve been waiting for this game for so many years now that the days leading up to its release were a painfully wistful and unproductive period. As a big fan of Kuro Game’s Punishing Gray Raven, I was, of course, also enthralled by the idea of playing another one of their titles. As a result, my expectations of the game were sky-high.

It certainly didn’t help that I couldn’t curb my anticipation. That’s what never qualifying for a single one of their testing periods will do to a person.

But I decided that it must be fate that I couldn’t get in ahead of the general public. Maybe the universe wanted me to experience the game only in the state the developers felt confident about. And so, fast forward many centuries (months) later, we finally arrived at its release date.

So, was all the hype and waiting worth it? Were my expectations met? They were!

… Mostly.

Look, I won’t shill a game created by one of my favorite developers without pointing out the elephant in the room. That is, Wuthering Waves has one of the most atrociously boring opening acts I’ve seen from a major mobile game developer. It even beats the slog that is Arknights’ entire story.

Having to spend the first few hours clicking through only marginally interesting dialogue was a major pain. Of course, there’s a good story hiding behind the walls of text. But couldn’t they have mixed some gameplay amidst all the exposition? Surely, they could’ve.

It really doesn’t bode well that the developers were forced to add a skip cutscene to practically every segment.

Unfortunately, Wuthering Waves opens up to that kind of experience immediately. This can easily hurt its chances of keeping players eager to play with its combat system. Of course, this isn’t true for those who play open-world games like Skyrim, where they would take the first opportunity to veer off the main storyline and do something else.

But unlike Skyrim, you must suffer through the game’s tiresome narrative because essential features are locked behind story progression. Most notable among these is the gacha, which is, of course, one of the main attractions for mobile games.

And unlike Skyrim, Wuthering Waves' side quests are also mostly just bad. But to make matters worse, it’s additionally handicapped by the fact that it’s not voiced and the background music doesn’t do it any favors. You’re really better off skipping all of the dialogue and proceeding with it for the loot.

Thankfully, the game is saved by its amazing combat system. It’s fast, technical, and plays like a dream. The team building is also amazing. Wuthering Waves’ Intro and Outro skills bring a lot of possibilities to the table, especially when more characters are released. It’s also accompanied by amazing visuals and hard-hitting sound effects, and the characters are very likable despite most of them only having a few minutes of screen time. However, this will change once you gain access to the companion stories.

The puzzles are also a lot of fun, particularly those that maximize the use of the game’s free camera.

Overall, Wuthering Waves is an excellent game, provided that you push through its mundane prologue. But those who persevere will be rewarded with possibly the best open world action RPG out on mobile at the moment.

Pros of Wuthering Waves

Things Wuthering Waves Got Right
Highly Technical Combat Awesome Team Building Design Easy Pre-Farming Elegant and Practical Visuals Convenient Map Tools Captivating Cutscenes

Highly Technical Combat

Wuthering Waves’ combat obviously takes a lot of inspiration from the developer’s previous title, Punishing Gray Raven. It revolves around managing a team of three, with a main damage dealer being supported by their two merry companions. This is done mostly through the game’s focus on rotating between characters to maintain buffs, coordinated attacks, and other combination effects.

The game also gives particular importance to timing certain actions, such as dodges and attacks. This can be felt with the game's parry mechanic, which can take players quite some time to master.

Movement mechanics also play a part in combat, especially if they take place in the overworld. Since your characters can simply vault over small obstacles or run up sheer walls quickly, you’ll never feel your pace slowed down by anything, provided that you were anticipating it.

Wuthering Waves’ ability to maintain its brisk pace is its greatest achievement. Regardless of what it throws at you, there is no shortage of tools and methods to keep going on the offensive. Distance also isn’t an issue, as you can simply start the battle from afar. Even enemy attacks present opportunities for you to pile on the damage.

Awesome Team Building Design

The impact of a character’s Intro and Outro skills (essentially skills that activate when they switch in and out, respectively) in creating teams is impossible to understate. These are assigned seemingly at random to specific Resonators, which are the game’s playable characters, allowing them to either expand their roles or double down on one particular duty.

A great example of the former is Danjin, who, despite having a kit that screams "use me as a main damage dealer," can also act as a support with her Outro skill that increases the next character’s Havoc damage. That means she can counterintuitively support the Rover’s Havoc form, who’s the kind of character designed to double down in their role as a damage dealer.

Other intro and outro skills have effects that range from healing to gathering enemies, etc. As a consequence of the diversity of intro and outro skills, many team combinations are possible under the right circumstances to perform specific functions. For example, a team composed of Jianxin, Chixia, and Verina or Baizhi can theoretically clear every overworld content due to their balanced offensive and defensive capabilities. Meanwhile, Havoc Rover, Danjin, and Verina can tackle high-level bosses weak to Havoc damage easily.

Of course, great team building doesn’t mean only opportunities are provided to you. Balance also matters. That’s where the genius of only being able to use three Resonators really manifests, as the limited slots mean you can’t build a team that can handle everything in the game.

The overworld team with Jianxin, Chixia, and Verina, for example, can’t tackle high-level Tower of Adversity content due to Jianxin not being much help with adhering to time limits (unless you have a really, really invested Chixia). On the other hand, Havoc Rover, Danjin, and Verina do not have many defensive options, necessitating good parries and dodges to survive.

Easy Pre-Farming

As a gacha game with character banners that rotate every couple or so weeks, players naturally tend to pre-farm materials and echoes for their desired upcoming Resonator. This is made extremely easy in Wuthering Waves compared to other games, as the Echoes (Wuthering Waves’ equivalent to Honkai Star Rail’s Relics or Genshin Impact’s Artifacts) can be farmed on the overworld without having to rely on one’s precious stamina. You can then use the spare stamina to farm for experience and materials, instead.

This is a very important detail to mention as Echo farming, like its HSR and GI counterparts, rely a lot on luck to get the right main and sub stats. To disconnect its farming from the time-based stamina recovery means you can get a boatload of farming done before the game tells you that you’ve exhausted the entire map of the enemies that drop the echo you need.

Elegant and Practical Visuals

Keeping with its pursuit of consistent momentum, Wuthering Waves’ characters possess skills that do not waste your time with long animations. Their attacks are swift, and the downtime between their hits is short. Similarly, even their ultimate skills are fast, including the cinematic cut-ins.

Instead of aesthetic beauty, Wuthering Waves pursued practicality. It prioritized its goal rather than flexing the visual expertise it has gained over the years. And that’s fine. There’s beauty in practicality, and what the game does have at the moment is rightfully alluring.

Convenient Map Tools

Gathering treasure chests and other essential collectibles across a relatively large open world can be a big pain on the behind. Even with Wuthering Waves’ incredibly fast movement options, it can take a decently long time to fully exhaust the map. However, with the Lootmapper and Sonar, you can mark unclaimed treasures easily, cutting all the bothersome nook-and-cranny searching you would otherwise have to subject yourself to otherwise.

Captivating Cutscenes

Kuro Games have always been impressive with their visuals. Wuthering Waves stands as a testament to their expertise, boasting some of the most spectacularly animated fights and dramatizations that can be found in a mobile game. This is much more apparent later on in the story, after the game has passed the snoozefest that is its prologue. The game isn't content with making you imagine. Instead, it shows you directly how each character moves, react, and change expressions, resulting in a clear depiction of humanity in their otherwise unrealistically beautiful visages.

Cons of Wuthering Waves

Things That Wuthering Waves Can Improve
Story Opens Terribly Banal Daily Quests Gacha Is Punishing Intensely Grindy Post-Game

It Has A Borefest Of An Opening

Oh, boy. I don’t even know where to start with this.

Wuthering Waves’ story, especially the first few acts, suffers from several problems simultaneously. While only a few are major issues, the collective damage they can deal to a player’s first impressions cannot be understated.

Its biggest and most blatant mistake is how it dumps an excessive amount of unnecessarily verbose slop toward your way, seemingly in an attempt to fabricate intrigue and paint its world. While this is sometimes fine, it’s only forgivable if it had a mix of actual gameplay to entertain yourself with. Instead, you’re stuck reading through scores of dialogue with questionable importance while wondering when the actual Open World Action RPG gameplay will start.

And it lasts for around two hours…

Another issue with the story is how it throws many of its characters at you right at the start. Yanyang aside, the game also introduces over a dozen characters as part of your initiation — even more if you consider those whose names are merely mentioned. With practically none of them aside from Yangyang having more than a few minutes of screentime, they’re all regrettably limited to forgettable parts of your early game experience.

That is a big shame, really. Considering Kuro Game’s experience with writing backstories as they have in Punishing Gray Raven, I have no doubt that these characters all have interesting lores behind their design.

Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll have to wait for some time before that becomes apparent (if true).

Before moving forward, the last problem I want to mention is Wuthering Waves’ baffling obsession with piecing clues together. While this is often what happens when games enter a phase of gathering information for subsequent confrontations, I found it funny that Wuthering Waves engaged in this twice within the first couple of hours of gameplay.

In addition, the Rover's involvement in this detective work is confusing because she technically is a foreigner among those she drags into it. Like, why does everyone trust the Rover almost unconditionally right at the start? It makes no sense. Only weird people with strange power fantasies would like getting the VIP treatment from complete strangers and without reason.

Even if things improve later on (which it kinda does), the damage has already been done. In terms of marketing, Wuthering Waves has already failed the first ten seconds of its hook, which can and will drive certain players away. At the very least, the narrative does become better (for whatever that’s worth), starting from UL14 (Union Level) and above.

Banal Daily Quests

Whoever designed the current laundry list of daily quests must have been doing the game design equivalent of an elementary schooler trying to fill out their essay word count with enough adverbs to make a teacher surrender. Honestly, I'd rather opt in the game's utterly unnecessary cooking feature than be forced to go out and sweep a random gathering of enemies in the middle of nowhere.

The main issue with Wuthering Waves' daily quest isn't its ease. If that was all it was, then it would actually be a boon for the game considering all the high-level enemies you'd have to beat up just to fulfill your weekly quota and ever-increasing power. A relaxing change of pace, in a way. The problem is how completely empty the tasks are relative to one's interests.

To name a few Daily Quest types, there are those that involve gathering materials, subjugating enemies, and interacting with citizens. As you would imagine, there fine details differ depending on the actual quest, so there should be a lot of variety. Right? That's true—on the surface level. Long story short, every gathering quest doesn't take a few seconds to complete, subjugations only involve the kind of mobs you'd eat for a passing snack, and every citizen quest involves some of the most uninteresting set of dialogues you can ever read.

Essentially, regardless of what you're playing Wuthering Waves for, the Daily Quest will not sate your craving. Thank god it's optional.

Gacha Is Punishing

Despite Wuthering Waves’ very attractive Weapon gacha system, it still uses the industry-standard (for some reason) 50-50 mechanic when pulling for a 5-star character. Although a soft pity at around 60 pulls and a hard pity at 80 somewhat lightens the blow, it still encourages skipping banners, particularly for those on a budget.

On top of that, the 5-star rates are also sub-1%, just like many other games. While common, that doesn’t excuse the really low chances of pulling for something many players would be forced to spend to get. In addition, the rate for 4-stars, which are usually the secondary targets for players engaging in the gacha, is at a shockingly low 6%.

To put it into perspective, if you want a character on the event banner along with their signature weapon, then you will need around 240 pulls to guarantee it. While this is certainly much better than some other games’ 320 pull requirement, it’s still a pretty big ask. For reference, 240 pulls will cost you around 600 USD, assuming that you started the banner with absolutely nothing on your wallet.

That’s far more than what most collector’s editions cost for most games.

Very Grindy Post-Game

Echoes are essential equipment to strengthen your Resonators. It allows them to increase their stats, such as their critical hit rates, energy recovery, elemental damage, etc. Hence, you’re going to have to farm those at some point, especially late in the game. However, the drop rate for these things is less than ideal, so you will inevitably look for more efficient ways to get them.

Enter Tacet Fields. These are spots on the map that spawn several waves of enemies upon activation. As a reward for clearing them, a reward node is spawned that costs 60 Waveplates to open. These are guaranteed to contain echoes that correspond to the Tacet Field you’re on.

So, why is this a problem? Because 60 Waveplates is hella expensive. To put it into perspective, that’s 50% more than what relic caverns in Honkai: Star Rail or three times what artifact domains in Genshin Impact request from you. Fortunately, it seems like the developers intend to address the Waveplate expenses in an upcoming patch.

The reason, I think, is very simple and is connected to the reason why you can farm endgame echoes on overworld enemies; Wuthering Waves simply doesn’t want you to get echoes from there. It wants you to roam the wilds, beat all sorts of enemies, and suck out their souls (figuratively) using your magic (figuratively) gourd.

And considering the multiple layers of RNG to get the perfect echo, you will have to get used to farming for hours for each character, especially if you resort to farming on the overworld instead of on Tacet Fields. On top of that, you’ll have to do it all over again if the substats you gain from them are bad.

This same philosophy can be applied to weapons since, due to the unreliable nature of gacha systems to get you specific items, you will often find yourself undergeared. Instead, the game allows you to craft weapons to assuage your situation a little. The only catch is that it takes a long, long while to gather materials to craft a single one.

Is Wuthering Waves Worth It?

It definitely is

To say that Wuthering Waves’ gameplay is good is an understatement. Kuro Game has brought its A game in the development of the combat system, and it shows; fights are incredibly fun and fast-paced, the movement is slick and dynamic, and it’s even accompanied by an incredible array of audiovisual effects.

However, to get to that point, you must get past its incredibly tedious opening acts. You’ll also have to put up with many hours of boring grind, hopefully with your own set of tunes. The returns are incredible, though, and I highly recommend the game.

Mobile App Store Pages
App Store			Google Play
Other Platforms
Epic Games			Dedicated Client

Wuthering Waves FAQ

Who’s the best character in Wuthering Waves?

It really depends on your preference. Right now, Encore, Verina, and Calcharo are top picks from the standard banner, while Jinhsi on version 1.1’s first banner is an excellent DPS.

How do you reroll in Wuthering Waves?

Risemaras (or rerolling) in Wuthering Waves is easy to do but hard to endure. All you have to do is to spend about thirty minutes going through the main story. Once the gacha is unlocked, you can immediately claim your giveaways in the mail and roll with them. If you don’t get who you want, you can either continue the game to hit pity or log in to another account and continue your risemara.

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Wuthering Waves Product Information

Title	WUTHERING WAVES
Release Date	May 22, 2024
Developer	Guangzhou Kuro Technology Co., Ltd.
Publisher	Guangzhou Kuro Technology Co., Ltd.
Supported Platforms	PC, Mobile
Genre	Action, RPG
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	N/A
Official Website	Wuthering Waves Website

Alfonso Majarucon

Writer of things from game, anime and manga reviews to news and webnovels. Hopelessly addicted to story-driven games, especially cross-platform ones. Favorite games include Punishing Gray Raven, Arknights, Limbus Company, Elden Ring, Touhou, Soul Nomad and the Disgaea series (except 3 and 6). Avid..