I have not played other gacha games, so am unable to offer a comparison to them. DragonSword: Awakening was originally a gacha game that was converted to a single-player experience (long story - you can find it elsewhere).
This is an enjoyable action game fantasy romp, with emphasis on providing a constant stream of short activities where numbers go up. It is something that can be played in short bursts, but very much "just one more activity". You have a roster of characters that increases over time, giving you more options to assemble a team of 3 to go explore and fight and so on. However, the main story mission and some storylines do have long cutscenes, which for those who just want 'action' may find hard to tolerate.
The building part is about picking which characters work well together (or you just enjoy using) and upgrading them in a headache inducing number of different ways. As you advance the main story, more characters and upgrade options open up, though you can free to just explore the expansive game world before that if you wish. Gameplay is pretty much just combat, and missions and short story beats are just there to give you a reason to go fight something or complete a dungeon (a sequence of combats).
I found the world exploration very enjoyable. There are hundreds of chests to find that gives you upgrade materials, but the world was nicely designed rather than a random mess. That said, I found the later game areas less polished and more sparse. A good 70% of the map was, I felt, good to excellent. The dungeons, which you are expected to do multiple playthroughs were also interesting. Each is like its own little story and quite distinctive, even if you are basically just fighting through them. They, and other special combats, have multiple levels of difficulty you can pick from for different rewards.
For those who care about such things, the team had limited resources and used AI to do localization and translations, and it shows. While the first 60% of the story is pretty decent, the English translations do get increasingly sloppy and could do with polishing over future patches; which to their credit they have been doing.
tl;dr - a simplistic but well polished gameplay experience, with consistent world and character designs. I did not have any tech issues but do have a relatively powerful system. Would recommend it as a fun little game, especially at its budget price.
