Vibrant graphics, excellent frame rate, great sound and music, and incredible net code.
You can choose from dozens of Mobile Suits from the 30 year old anime series, each with its unique advantages, disadvantages, and move sets.
99% of the time the player does not need to aim at his opponent, as everything is automatically locked on for you. The catch is that the player must correctly time when to attack his target to ensure a hit and maximum damage, while minimizing his own vulnerability.
Much of the game operates on a risk vs reward system, where using a higher risk attack can lead to big damage on the enemy if you land the hit. For example, typically your main weapon is one of your weakest weapons, but it allows you to shoot while moving. Thus your risk is low, and your reward is low too. But you might use a bigger weapon that does far more damage, but stops your unit in its tracks for about 1 or 2 seconds as you shoot it. So you commit to a high risk action for high reward. If your attack misses, your enemy may punish you severely for the miss!
Being a Gundam game, each unit has a wide variety of ranged and melee attacks. Some Mobile Suits specialize in either ranged or melee attacks, while others are OK at both kinds of fighting.
Players can perform a variety of actions that allow them to evade attacks. You can "step" into 4 directions by double tapping a direction. This evades the lock-on attributes of most attacks. You can also "Boost dash cancel" which lets you cancel out of an attack action you have performed. This is useful when you have initiated a long duration, immobile action (such as shooting a giant cannon), but wish to quickly cancel the action and regain mobility.
Personally I find this game fun but far too fast paced. The amount of button presses per minute necessary for online victory in is quite high. You need to mash buttons constantly in order to survive. Plus, despite there only being 4 players in a match, there is a lot of things going on at once.
If you're a Gundam fan, this game is a must-have. But be prepared for an extremely fast paced game that demands lightning quick reflexes.
Random notes:
- There is no voice chat online
- Most of the game is in Japanese text/audio, but it is very playable if you don't understand Japanese
- You can play the game on any PS3, since PS3 is region-free
- You can play two player offline co-op or versus. Only one player can go online for play though
- There are two online modes: Ranked and Free Match. In Ranked, the game tries to match you up with players of similar skill. In Free Match, you can join game lobbies and just play random people.
- Offline, you can customize the game mechanics settings (time limit, damage amount, etc.), but online, you can only play with the default settings. Kinda a bummer
- The main single player mode is Trial mode. Here you can try to get high score rankings on various missions. These missions often recreate scenarios from the anime show. You can fight boss enemies, defend targets, destroy capital sships and so forth. As you play, you gain points which can be spent on upgrading various aspects of the Suits.