From Saturday, September 2nd to Sunday, September 3rd, 2017, the
Gundam Versus Open Beta was made available for all players willing and able to download the application from the PlayStation Store. I was able to pre-load the beta earlier in the week (after attempting multiple times from crashes from the PS Store for roughly 4+ hours... Seriously, Sony fix your shitty store!) and was able to get a bit of time with the game.
Unfortunately, this is Namco Bandai and all of the beta's gameplay was blocked from streaming via PlayStation 4, so I wasn't able to capture any footage of the gameplay. Let's hope the retail release later this month won't have this problem. Fingers crossed, folks.
Controls
The first few matches I wasn't really feeling the controls, but after I was experimenting during matches (you're going to be doing this a LOT actually as most suits feel different despite the similar control scheme). Double tapping the Jump button and holding any direction on the analog stick will Boost Dash in that direction as long as you have energy left on the Boost gauge, which refills automatically as soon as your Gundam's touches the ground again. Tapping the analog stick in any direction twice will perform a quick sidestep evasion. This is extremely helpful for evading melee attacks upclose as it tends to make the tracking properties of those moves whiff when they would normally catch Boost Dashes.
Your ability to Switch Targets on the fly as fast as possible is going to be essential for surviving battles against multiple opponents at once. Your "Striker" acts as an assist in this game, offering a limited number of times that support character can assist you with their special attack or utility functionality. Last but not least, there are "Awakenings" that power up your mobile suit for a limited time, but offer extremely powerful measures for dispatching foes in one fell swoop. These attacks are only available when there's at least 1 bar full on the Awakening gauge.
Mobile Suit Selection/Variety
Nothing from
Mobile Fighter G Gundam here, but the Universal Century timeline is VERY well represented here, outside of some surprisingly glaring omissions, but I'm guessing those will be free DLC or pop up as bosses in Ultimate Battle Mode in the full retail release. I was very pleased to see both signature mobile suits from the
Thunderbolt OVA were in this, but Iron Blooded Orphans only seemed to have just two suits to represent that series. That threw me off to say that Barbatos is on the damn cover of the game and in the opening cinematic with RX-79 Gundam.
Gundam Wing has several suits, available with even the Sanc Kingdom specialized Torres units as support types.
Gundam SEED has fewer suits than I would have imagined from that series (Athrun Zala's two Gundams from that series is one HUGE omission along with Buster Gundam, but the Blitz and Duel are in?)
I'm crossing my fingers that more suits from other series outside of the U.C. timeline are included in the retail release later this month or this roster is going to be pretty biased.
I thought it was pretty cool that players were allowed to mark and favorite mobile suits for quick selections before missions. I hope those favorites carry over from the beta to the retail release later this month. There's a LOT of mobile suits to browse through to find your preferred favorites, despite being able to cycle through the selections by specific Gundam series though.
Overall Gameplay
The best way to describe the action in this game is to compare it to the
Virtual On series. Your weapons recharge/reload on a specific timer depending on how powerful they are in terms of balance, while players must regulate and manage their Boost gauge supply for movement and other special options, all while keeping up with this frantic gameplay that each Mobile Suit (MS) provides in this game.
There's no in-game tutorial (it's actually grayed out on the main menu), but it's simple enough to get the hang of over time after viewing the controls in the settings menu. I find it crazy that some people actually play this on an arcade fightstick like it's
Street Fighter.
Free Battle allows players to "practice" in teams of 2v2 matches. This isn't a "true" practice mode, but you can tweak the AI from brain-dead easy to extremely hard as you test your skills or try out various mobile suits. This was the best you had to offer in terms of practicing offline and testing out the various MS types that are available in the beta.
Multiplayer Matches come in two flavors -
Casual Battle and
Player Battle, both of which I really didn't bother to try out during the two days of the beta this weekend. Ranked Battle was unavailable of course, but will be available in the retail release.
Most of my free time was spent playing the
Ultimate Battle mode. This mode is reminiscent of
Gears of War or
Halo's Horde and Firefight modes, pitting players against waves of opponents with a boss wave coming up after every five rounds. As an added bonus, every interval intermission between the sets of 5 has a bonus "Extra Wave" that gives players a chance to get more reward points working together to defeat a special boss encounter or competing with each other to defeat as many enemies as possible or inflict the most damage within a set time limit. These bonus waves are completely random and even bring in various other players online if you are playing online with a friend. Offline, you are joined by AI companions as your partners. This mode alone got me really excited for the retail release as I could see myself playing this mode exclusively online or offline with friends and/or randoms. 15 waves was simple enough but the farthest I got on the 30 waves was up to 29 solo while the highest I got with a partner online was the mid-20s, so it's definitely no cakewalk.
One thing players are going to be doing for the first few days of with the game is going to be trying out all of the various mobile suits in the game and seeing how they fit to your preferred play style. Some of them are strictly long-range attackers, others are strictly close-range with all melee weapons, while most mobile suits are a hybrid of both, bringing the best of long and close range combat. If that wasn't enough, each mobile suit has a unique moveset, which can be viewed by hitting the pause button and checking out the command list. Some of these movelist are pretty short and bare bones, then others, such as Gundam SEED's Strike Gundam has a multitude of special moves due to the fact that Gundam can transform into 4 different configurations (Aile, Sword, Launcher, and IWSP). This isn't the only mobile suit capable of such functionality either as all of these playable mobile suits have an impressive amount of depth that they each bring to the table.
Char's Zaku IIS can transform into a Z-Gok to either fire it's Mega Particle Beam Cannon (seems to have super armor on this move) or throw a tank, Wing Gundam Zero, Zeta Gundam, along with a few other mobile suits can transform into their mobile armor/fighter modes as long as they have meter in the Boost gauge to do so.
For those thinking that there's not much to this being a "legit" fighting game, I hate to be the one to inform you for being sadly mistaken. There's a lot of depth in terms of "Boost Canceling" - as in every action in the game can be cancelled with proper Boost Dash timing during the animation. That alone opens up a world of new combos that I'm sure fans familiar with with the
Naruto games and of course Virtual On (in terms of how the targeting system works) would feel at home with. Every character has their own levels of mastery with some easier than others to utilize to their full potential.
Closing Thoughts
To be quite honest, Ultimate Battle mode completely sold me onto my purchase for later this month. Otherwise, if this was team-based and entirely multiplayer oriented like the
Dissidia Final Fantasy NT closed beta left the impression of on that front, then I would have cancelled my pre-order reservation by now. Don't get me wrong,
Dissidia fans, but I'm not looking for another Overwatch-style multiplayer focused game in my life.
Gundam Versus' beta made me happy that the entertainment here isn't only limited to Versus gameplay. There's more than enough here in this single mode to make me happy as a Gundam fan and as a fan of single player content. With the Mission Mode(s) (which would allow players to relive key moments from throughout the
Gundam franchise) and other various co-op content that is going to be available at launch, I can see myself being preoccupied with those modes for months to come, with or without friends to play them with in co-op or in the event the online scene for this game goes dead after the Week 1 hype dies down. We all remember what happened to
Anarchy Reigns after the initial launch of that title... That still makes me sad to this day thinking about it.
I think this is in a great place going into the North American release of the game (FYI the game is already out internationally in Japan) with something for all
Gundam fans to enjoy here. I was surprised at the netcode being stable for this too. It wasn't nowhere as clunky nor as buggy as the
Dissidia Final Fantasy NT closed beta was. My only gripe is that newcomers might be in a little over their head in terms of accessibility and learning how to get the swing of things starting out. This game isn't as daunting as Virtual On was back in the day, but there's a few small things that will be completely over players heads that I hope won't turn them away from embracing this game in the long haul.
I plan on streaming a lot of it if Namco Bandai allows it anyway on PS4... I guess we'll find out when it launches later this month.
