Don't get me wrong, this is not a *bad* game by any means. This is a game I would not *recommend*.
You do can have fun with friends with it, the character roster is memorable, the lore is correct without being transcendental. The base price and the DLC prices are very fair. The game's lifespan is excellent too.
So what's wrong and why I wouldn't recommend it, you'd ask me? Let's set aside the inherent frustration (or even rage worthy moments) that comes with randomness being whimsical and harassing you for no reason. Here's a list:
1 - Every character is not equally fun, well designed, playable, let alone balanced. Sure, perfect balance doesn't exist, but we are talking about huge gaps and huge flaws that have been lingering for years and no apparent serious care about those. And no, we are not talking about the mob characters who are meant to be weak. Good luck making use of Teotoratta. Have a nice brain meltdown trying to play as your beloved Sweet Breaker. Watch as Marie Poppo has a nice, free and overly unfair hyper that is a "Press X key to win" with barely any stretch. We could go on like that with many others.
2 - If you're not playing with friends, then you have to "enjoy" the company of what public lobbies can hand you. Which is the finest Internet experience that can be expected from a cheap but not free game with zero moderation. It ranges from a few nice people, to people who consistently take debatable decisions even after hundreds (or even thousands) of hours, with attention seekers, trolls, entitled people and potato Internet/PC owners in the middle. Thank GOD the game has an entrance fee, because otherwise it'd be an absolute nightmare.
3 - The game has a poor use of Steam's matchmaking, contact management and party moderation. Not only do you have to add people on Steam to keep track instead of it being managed by the game servers (which quickly leads to clogging your Steam contacts), but good luck blocking people you have met ingame and who ruined your experience somehow. You cannot kick/block other players or spectators during the gameplay, you have to wait to be back to the lobby, which leads to pests being free to come and go as they please. There is not even any staff to manage complaints either: it is either you report to Steam or nothing.
4 - Twin shot regarding the use of Steam actually. The second shot goes to the netcode. It is terrible, the desyncs happen way too often, you lose connection very frequently too. And the cherry on the top: don't play on Tuesday midnight, because the Steam maintenance crashes all the lobbies at that time.
5 - Bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs. I want bugs in my game. And when you fix a bug, please add 10 more at the same time. Of, sprinkle a bit of crash here, some memory leak there and voilà this Mio cake looks delicious. Even inexperienced people can easily tell that the game's code is a huge pile of spaghetti code and that no real effort is made to make it robust. Sure, fixing this is very costly and provides only small user experience, but that excuse doesn't remove the bugs. Furthermore, it looks like the source code is poorly managed too, since fixes and tweaks get very frequently un-fixed or un-tweated. Spaghetti code experience: a good chunk of the bugs that occur seem to make zero sense and would never appear in a more robust game. Overall, enjoying updates will drain your patience.
6 - Everything in the hype and its momentum, next to zero for the older content. On top of every update being a bugfest, you are expected to be a good fanboy, chant the greatness of the studio, close your eyes on a good half of the bugs and blatant design flaws. Because that's what will remain on a long term and never be adressed. You are meant to be hyped, got it?
7 - Now my personal gripe. It is the way how suggestions and feedback are handled. They are not entirely ignored, thank God. But what is taken into account or not is based on very debatable methods. So take a vast majority of suggestions and feedbacks, throw them into the basket, and the only ones that remain are those that come either from your personal ultra fanboys who are ultra biased and dictate who is welcome in the community or not, or you need to be incredibly luck. In all cases, what seems to be taken into account is by no means representative of the majority or even necessarily truly important.
8 - The online community looks nice at first glance, but it actually enforces a "different kind of intolerant". In other words, if you think differently than the attention seekers, if you have (fair) criticism, if you don't come with a heavy set of tools to avoid hurting people's sensitiveness, then you are not welcome and met with strong hostility. Hypocrisy and mutual ego feeding is the rule. Saying "gg" mechanically in the end of a game while not thinking it is a rule. Thank God not everyone is an Internet precious snowflake and you can meet some people with whom you can actually have real talk and genuine fun, but they become more and more scarce.
So yeah, that's how it is. A game that looks nice, has great potential, but everything is ruined with poor management and a community that isn't fit for responsible adults. If you stay between friends and have zero expectations regarding the game updates, then you can have fun here and there casually in your private lobby. Otherwise, the "full experience" has quite a lot of the bad that Internet can offer.
I love this game, but not the full package that comes with this game. Which is why I wouldn't recommend it, unless you just want to chill with friends.
