This one is pretty good for Beyblade. It's not the best I've seen, but it's a steep upgrade to XOne in terms of gameplay due to a lot of updated mechanics and easier part collection, though it does have some more severe faults and significantly more impactful bugs as well.
[h1] The Plot/Game Summary: [/h1]
There's a tournament going on, and with it a chance to get on a pro team if you make it to the top 3. You and your Beycrafter friend are here to fight school rivals, pros, and more on the way towards reaching this lofty goal. It's nothing super complex the way XOne wasn't all that complex either, but that's Beyblade sometimes.
[h1] The Good: [/h1]
- Beyblade typings are greatly overhauled from the previous game to have unique abilities, which helps them all stand out from one another instead of being a somewhat arbitrary label like XOne. On the other hand, that means all beys of their type act pretty similarly and means boosting their primary stats is generally optimal.
- The Counter ability also has a trigger window instead of being a hold down parry, which makes it feel both more efficient and less draining on your action resources.
- Also improved from XOne is the ability system. Now [i]YOU[/i] get to choose the abilities your blades have, and if your blade or lock chip has a special move then you can use it regardless of your ability unlocks. No more getting stuck with cruddy moves or a Rock/Paper/Scissors method of activating them.
- You'll unlock new moves as you level up which gives leveling up some purpose beyond the blanket stat boost, and the moves also now have to consider their activation speed instead of just their raw power. If you're too slow, a higher damage number may not matter because you'll just get countered. It's also less grindy to get to higher levels.
- Though some special moves are still carried over from XOne, the animations seem smoother and many of them don't feel as boring even when repeated. I'll probably never get tired of Fang Leon just grabbing the opponent and spinning them around in circles like it's Vice Leopard from Burst.
- The coating system does work well for making uniquely styled beys, and coating parts does offer a small stat buff. It's great if you want it, but the buff is minor so there's no pressure to coat things you don't want to change aesthetically (or just use the DLC Clear Coat, your choice).
- Parts you've previously upgraded can always be improved, both by rank and level. You never need to stop upgrading a part you like because it doesn't have to go out of style!
- Instead of just getting one part per battle you get multiple (and sometimes coating materials after a certain point), which makes it more likely to get the parts you want after a battle.
- There's so many great part recolors from your rivals, friends, and special bladers scattered throughout the tournament locations that I wish were real! Sadly most you only really get access to in the postgame, these are great colors!
- Most of the XOne DLC will be recognized by EvoBattle, which gives you some freebie parts and/or money if you've got them. You also get a small amount of money and some online titles if you've completed the main campaign of XOne, so there's more reason to upgrade if you've already played the first game even without the DLC.
- Postgame Spoiler: [spoiler]The X Tower challenge returns again, but with fixed rewards and a challenger mode afterwards to earn stock parts through. Certainly beats the old challenge system, even if the maps feels emptier.[/spoiler]
[h1] The Meh: [/h1]
- DLC beys break the shops quite badly. Buying from a DLC shop slot will make the same slot in the current regular shop have infinite stock, which absolutely can let you rank up parts to levels far above the CPU bladers and ruin balance pretty easily if you can get a ton of money.
- To go with the above, you can get a ton of money easily by just repeating Bey Challenge Box entries that require collecting enough copies of certain parts. Collect 25 lock chips at 500/each, then use one for upgrade points, check the challenge box so it registers it's at 24 and relocks the box, then buy one more and collect your collect 25 reward of 5,000 by opening it again. Instant profit of 4,500. Even more broken is buying so many cheap Lock Chips that you reach 500 parts total, as you get a whopping 50,000 for that achievement and makes this ludicrous amounts of money...
- ...but the above is time-consuming menuing and incredibly, incredibly [i]boring[/i]. You are getting utterly no gameplay out of this sort of cheese, even if you'll quickly steamroll everything when you're done with massively upgraded parts.
- The tutorials are necessary, but the first tutorial gives you and your opponent infinite stamina and expects you to either attack or counter to deal any damage at all... but your bey struggles to land attacks unless they're incredibly close and your opponent also struggles to land attacks on you for you to counter. It makes that particular fight drag on for far too long just running around waiting for the bey positions to line up just right, and is especially weird because the attack tracking is better in normal play.
[h1] The Bad: [/h1]
- Unlike XOne where most ratchet designs that weren't part of the toyline had a clear core and colored ring like the early X era that looked nice, the generic ratchets in EvoBattle (which are [i]everywhere[/i]) look quite ugly and boring in monocolored designs. Off-height ratchets like 4-55 are always monocolor so they get a pass, but what's the excuse for everything else? There's not enough color variety here, and coats don't typically fix that.
- Due to the same rolling back of some "collect X number of parts" Challenge Boxes, you can get "one time only" locked parts more than once if you dip below the point where you'd unlock them. This absolutely can junk up your inventory because you have utterly no way to rid yourself of them.
- A lot of the parts given by the XOne DLC are rewards in EvoBattle, and thus lock themselves in your inventory as soon as you get them and can't be used to upgrade other parts or sold. Part boxes opened during missions can also give you locked reward parts, which can cause yet more inventory clutter. Feels even worse when you unlock a reward and it's something you already had from DLC.
- There's always a chance of some random major bug in EvoBattle. From crashes and frozen loading screens to the ability activation buttons being swapped around, it seems like each patch either adds in some new strange issue or fixes the ones that were created the patch before. There have been times it hasn't really been properly playable due to the weird bugs going around. Though it's stable and playable now, there are times it hasn't been.
- Some of the Challenge Box conditions don't display properly when achieved but will unlock if you try to open them, and some postgame characters either aren't appearing when expected or have unknown requirements that aren't really told anywhere. This makes 100% clearing the challenge boxes a pain, assuming it's possible.
[h1] Overall: [/h1]
EvoBattle is a huge upgrade, but sometimes quite buggy and broken. The economy is in shambles from the Challenge Box system, but unless you play to break the game as wide open as possible and overpower everything off the start you'll find a ton of fun here with the improved battle and ability systems. It really is a better designed game than XOne, just way too buggy and unclear on postgame unlock conditions sometimes.
