Wuthering Waves is an open world action RPG developed by Kuro Games that has recently reached its 1st anniversary. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth playing.

This is an updated review in celebration of its 1 year anniversary. Read our original Wuthering Waves review to see how much it has changed since releasing.

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:
　⚫︎　Elemental ailments and character attributes
　⚫︎　Open world exploration
　⚫︎　Action RPG combat with multiple layers of techs
　⚫︎　Flight and glide mechanics
　⚫︎　Overworld equipment farming
　⚫︎　Character gacha
　⚫︎　Guaranteed weapon banner

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

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

Wuthering Waves Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Captivating, Character-Driven Stories A Narrative Delivery Straight Out of a Movie The Visuals Are Insanely Beautiful Combat Can Be Casual, or Extremely Sweaty It’s More of a Game Than a Gacha	The Endgame Grind Is Absurd New Players Still Have to Face the Prologue We Need More Dudes

Wuthering Waves Overall Score - 94/100

Wuthering Waves still begins on a rough note with its now almost signature disappointing prologue, but those who stick with it will find a tightly written, character-driven story full of emotional highs and a rare, proactive protagonist who meaningfully drives the narrative. While the core combat has stayed largely the same since launch, the game has steadily refined its encounter design with increasingly complex, gimmick-heavy bosses and a broad range of content that caters to both high-skill players and casual enjoyers alike. Coupled with top-tier visuals, vastly improved audio, and a gacha system that feels more like an optional layer than a structural pillar, it now stands as one of the most complete and generous experiences the genre has to offer.

Wuthering Waves Story - 9/10

Wuthering Waves still opens with one of the weakest prologues I’ve seen in a major gacha release—poorly paced and awkwardly delivered. But if you can push past it, you’ll find a tightly written, character-driven narrative that consistently delivers emotional highs, tense climaxes, and genuine attachment to its cast. The playable protagonist is a standout as well, offering a refreshing break from the usual self-insert archetype by actively driving the story forward with a distinct, memorable presence.

But you still have to get past the same prologue as it was released with, though.

Wuthering Waves Gameplay - 10/10

Gacha games that attract more than just players with a propensity for gambling are quite rare. That said, Wuthering Waves' core combat remains unchanged since launch, but its boss design has evolved significantly, featuring more complex, gimmick-heavy encounters reminiscent of Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. The most intense version of these fights can offer brutally difficult challenges that push players to master mechanics, with added patterns and punishing damage scaling. Despite this hardcore layer, though, the game still offers plenty for casual players, including exploration, minigames, rotating events, and accessible combat content that doesn’t require peak performance to enjoy.

Wuthering Waves Visuals - 10/10

Honestly, I don’t think there’s a more visually stunning mobile title than Wuthering Waves right now. Whether I’m deep in combat or simply exploring the world, the game constantly delivers breathtaking sights, be it through dazzling visual effects, beautifully crafted character models, or its sweeping, scenic environments. There may be close contenders, but in terms of consistent visual impact and aesthetic appeal across all aspects of its experience, this one stands at the top.

Wuthering Waves Audio - 9/10

At launch, Wuthering Waves had forgettable music aside from a few standout battle tracks, and the English voice acting was wildly inconsistent. The only real highlights were its top-tier sound effects and a handful of solid performances from select talents. A year later, though, the transformation is undeniable—nearly every track is a banger, the voice work is consistently excellent, and the sound design remains as sharp as ever. In fact, the voice acting has become such a strength that it now plays a major role in elevating the emotional weight of the story.

Unfortunately, though, the game does struggle a bit in the audio department whenever there’s any kind of downtime between fights and events.

Wuthering Waves Value for Money - 9/10

Normally, when evaluating a gacha title, I base its Value for Money on factors like the economy, pull rates, powercreep, and shop pricing; elements that directly affect how friendly it is to free-to-play players and its value for spenders. In this case, however, Wuthering Waves surpasses the conventional framework of gacha design. It offers a complete, immersive single-player experience where progression and enjoyment aren’t dictated solely by saving for banners or spending premium currency. It feels more like a carefully crafted title that happens to feature a gacha system, rather than one built around it—an achievement that only a rare few in the genre can genuinely claim.

It's still a gacha game with a 50/50 system at the end of the day, though.

Wuthering Waves Review: Aged Liked the Finest Wine

It’s been a full year since I started playing Wuthering Waves. And while I could say it’s been a wild ride with its fair share of ups and downs, I can proudly say it’s been mostly the former.

To say that Wuthering Waves has improved since its rocky launch would be a massive understatement. Those of us who stuck with it since day one were lucky enough to witness the transformation of a game that launched as unoptimized slop—comparable to one of Koei Tecmo’s infamous PC ports—into one of the most polished and memorable titles on the market. So, I thought it was about time to give our review an update, considering the massive strides the game has made since that disappointing start.

For context, Wuthering Waves is an open-world action RPG developed by the same creative minds behind Punishing: Gray Raven, arguably still the best mobile action game available. It tells the story of the Rover, a mysterious figure suffering from partial memory loss, despite being connected to some of the world’s most powerful individuals.

Gameplay-wise, it carries over elements or a derivative of them from its predecessor, like character swapping and Quick Time Events, but ditches the Ping System in favor of a more traditional cooldown-based combat setup. In exchange, it offers deeper mechanical complexities, allowing players to squeeze out extra damage and faster clears through animation cancels and rapid character swaps to juggle different gauges.

It Rewards Every Level of Commitment

Wuthering Waves’ combat has barely changed since its launch. That’s not a bad thing, though. The mechanics still run as deep as your average niche action game with a cult-like following of hyper-sweaty players addicted to spreadsheets and perfect runs. However, the experience itself has undergone some evolution over the past year with the addition of bosses that don’t simply run toward you to socially distance your head from your shoulders.

Nowadays, bosses feel more like those you would find in a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta title with their very gimmicky fights. In fact, of the bosses introduced since the game’s launch, only a few of them don’t have some kind of gimmick attached to their movesets. Some of them fly, some of them have multiple phases, one of them has charged attacks you need to maneuver around, and a couple even force you to use your grappling hook just to stay on the offensive.

Their attacks become even more varied when you face their Tactical Hologram versions. In a nutshell, Hologram bosses are the game’s equivalent to a Dark Souls fight. The highest difficulties are brutally hard, often featuring the kind of damage scaling that can drop your characters in two to three shots (sometimes one, for the more telegraphed ones), and additional attack patterns that their overworld counterparts do not have.

That said, is the game just for sweatlords with a penchant for reading tables and squeezing every millisecond of responsiveness from their muscles? Not at all. There’s an incredible amount of content for the casual players, too—exploration, minigames, and character stories, you name it. Heck, in my opinion, Wuthering Waves’ exploration is such a gratifying experience due to its incredible audiovisuals and the freedom afforded to you with its flight mechanics that it’s fun all on its own, even if it doesn’t give you any currency as a reward by itself. Now, if only they allowed flight in the first region…

Anyway, of course, they can also enjoy the combat to a high enough level, as there is less demanding content for them to engage in, such as the Tower of Adversity (basically just gear and DPS checks), Whimpering Wastes, and the Illusive Realm. These are rewarding, rotating events refreshed anywhere from every one to three weeks, and they don’t cost the players half their remaining sanity to complete. In fact, these events are arguably much more lucrative than Holograms because their rewards refresh every time their rotation resets—unlike the latter, where you can only obtain the rewards once.

However, if you do want to experience Wuthering Waves in all of its glory, I do recommend dabbling in Tactical Holograms regardless. The high-difficulty fights showcase the game’s mechanical complexities, forcing players to learn boss patterns, timings, and positioning, and punishing mistakes extremely hard via brute force. As a result, these fights are the most satisfying the game can currently offer, with each victory feeling like a hard-earned triumph against overwhelming odds.

Min-Maxxing Needs a Ton of Luck and Resources, Though

Now, if you’re like me and you enjoy squeezing out the highest possible numbers within your means, you’re going to end up farming for echoes, which serve as this game’s version of equipment, a lot. These things offer the biggest stat boosts outside of the direct ones you get from skills and passives.

Unfortunately, getting good echoes depends on two entire layers of luck. Let’s say you’re building a DPS like Carlotta, who relies on crit rate, crit damage, skill damage, and glacio bonuses. You’ll not only need to find echoes with the correct main stat, like ATK% or Glacio DMG+, but also pray they roll the right substats, which are just the main stats but in smaller values.

And no, this isn’t a simple matter of farming five extras just in case. With how brutal the substat odds are, chances are you’ll burn through a dozen or more echoes before even glimpsing the metaphorical finish line.

Naturally, this eats resources like a black hole. Personally, I haven’t seen my tuners — the material used for substat rolls — return to four digits ever since I started caring about builds. In fact, I run out constantly, which triggers a not-so-mild panic attack every time I find an echo with the main stat I actually need.

Also, just in case it wasn’t obvious: this whole process takes an obscene amount of time.

Look Up Often. It’ll Be Worth Your Time.

I used to think that I loved Wuthering Waves’ visuals enough. After all, watching its combat still felt like I was participating in an action movie, and the short cut-ins for ultimate skills, combat animations, and visual effects never stopped being a showcase of the developers’ expertise gained from developing Punishing: Gray Raven. Oh, and of course, the character designs and model quality are still at their peak—probably only Girls’ Frontline 2: Exilium and Zenless Zone Zero are direct competitors on that aspect among currently released titles.

However, it wasn’t until the Black Shores and Rinascita updates that I realized I had completely forgotten another aspect of the game’s visuals that I absolutely fell for: the world itself.

Every location, every landmark, every star in the sky felt like it had a purpose. A past event with the character Shorekeeper, for example, can be visited in Rinascita. You also have the meteor shower and constellations visible from the Beohr Waters that serve as contrast with the story of the Order’s Avinoleum being dragged into the sky to seal the great evil of the Dark Tide. Then there’s the intimidating, yet strangely reassuring spire of the Tethys System’s Data Torrent, and the quaint sight of the Shorekeeper’s personal quarters surrounded by Nova flowers in the Black Shores’ Eidoscope.

And how could I forget the crowning glory of 2.0—when the entirety of Rinascita’s high fantasy-like world was revealed in all its sunlit glory while Yuria Miyazono’s almost mystical song “A Fairy Tale” plays in the background? Pure magic, I tell you.

Honestly speaking, this was the aspect that got me wondering—was I really playing a free-to-play mobile game? Because the visuals alone could easily match any AAA release out there, really.

I Rarely Tear Up Reading Gacha Stories. I Certainly Did Here

To say that Wuthering Waves’ prologue arc was one of the worst I’ve seen among the big gacha releases of 2024 is… accurate, actually. In fact, I consider going through it an overall worse experience than repeatedly dying to mere goblins in Wizardry Variants Daphne during the first 10 minutes of the latter. I’m not going to bash it here, though; I’ve done enough of that on our first review of the game that you can read here. All I can say is that it only barely managed to save itself in the end with its really competent ability to conclude its chapters.

For the most part, though, it was actually bad enough to make you quit the game.

Things changed for the better ever since the game was dunked on hard for it, though. For example, the conclusion of the Huanglong storyline at Mt. Firmament, which followed the chapters involved in the whole “1.0 has garbage story” (it’s true) fiasco, was quite excellent. And after that, Wuthering Waves only released banger stories after banger, with Shorekeeper’s tearjerker of a story in 1.3, Rinascita’s dramatic heroics in 2.0, and even the whole fishing event story that involved you playing Dredge for basically 75% of it in 2.1.

This is especially true for the 2.2 patch, though, which is arguably the best version of the game in terms of story. Honestly speaking, I could glaze over that patch for an entire article’s worth of our time (and I may in the future), but basically it exemplified the game’s excellent layered worldbuilding, using environmental storytelling and lore-rich details to deepen themes of memory, faith, and despair. Characters like Cantarella and Cartethya feel compelling, too, due to their complex motivations, subtle emotional shifts, and realistic vulnerabilities. Even the dialogue pacing and camera work elevate the narrative delivery, allowing moments of silence and body language to reveal more than exposition.

And if that wasn’t enough, the standout performance of the protagonist him/herself deserves an ovation, breaking through the common expectations of gacha main characters to be blank slates that allow players to insert themselves into the game. Instead, they directly influence the narrative and exert their presence on the world in order to shift the events into the direction they want.

In other words, he/she exerts real main character energy.

You Still Have to Get Past the Prologue, Though

Unfortunately to all my readers and any of those who have started to develop an interest in trying Wuthering Waves out, starting it will still demand for you to experience its controversial prologue for yourself. On the other hand, the devs gave us the ability to skip cutscenes and cinematics, so it’s entirely optional now.

… I don’t think that’s the right way to address the issue, though. If you ask me, the whole 1.0 story should just get a complete overhaul so that those who wanted to experience every slice of the story cake would have an overall positive experience.

Yes, There Are Still Many Other Issues

The game needs more men. Yes, I know I just opened this section with that statement with zero context, but I just wanted to get it out of my chest as soon as I could.

For context (finally), there are currently 34 (35 if we don’t consider the male and female Rover as the same) playable characters in Wuthering Waves. Of that number, though, only eight of them are men. In other words, there are over three women for every man in the game. But if that’s not ridiculous enough for you, then keep in mind that within that statistic, there’s only three males released as limited characters compared to twelve females. That’s one dude for every four dudettes.

It doesn’t bug me much, though, considering that I never pull for any males. But, I do admit that this game should definitely try to balance out the genders considering its female demographic… and because that would give me more banners to skip.

There are also some issues I would highly appreciate to be addressed in future patches, such as our inability to automatically lock echoes with the main stats we need (manually doing so is a massive pain), flight being unavailable anywhere outside Rinascita, consumable crates being very difficult to differentiate, etc.

Does that affect the overall experience? No, it doesn’t. These are simply nitpicks. However, they’re still points of improvement that the game could really use.

Is Wuthering Waves Worth It?

I Still Can’t Believe This Game Is Free

Between its engaging stories (not including the prologue, obviously), gorgeous visuals, amazing music, and captivating gameplay, I’m still hard-pressed to believe that Kuro Game has offered this as a free-to-play title. Sure, it has microtransactions, but at the end of the day, it’s not as if anyone is required to tap into their credit cards.

Wuthering Waves, in a way, gives me hope for a sustainable cycle between developers and players—the former striving to create a live service game everyone can enjoy, while paying customers provide financial support and dependent players help promote it.

Of course, it’s not a perfect title by any means. There are still many quality-of-life improvements that would be nice to have, such as the ability to automatically lock Echoes with specific main stats upon acquisition. Being able to use flight outside of Rinascita would also be great. But those are nitpicks. At the end of the day, is Wuthering Waves worth your time—or, even better, your money?

Absolutely.

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

Wuthering Waves FAQ

Which character should I roll for in Wuthering Waves?

At the time of this writing, the best use of pull currencies for new players is to try pulling for Zani and Phoebe. If they don’t have enough for both, obtaining Zani alone is sufficient, and players can save for a future Phoebe rerun while using Spectro Rover in the meantime.

Who’s the top tier character in Wuthering Waves?

If you’re interested in a tier list for the game, please check out our wiki!

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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, PS5
Genre	Action, RPG
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	N/A
Official Website	Wuthering Waves Website

Alfonso Majarucon

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