M.A.S.S. Builder

我能看懂英文不是你不汉化的理由

4 hours spent JUST customizing my mech. Have not even touched the gameplay, yet. 4 hours, well-spent. I regret nothing. UPDATE: 24 hours later I have built 3 mechs. It's taking longer as I continue to master the AMAZING creation system because I'm discovering new tricks to let me bring crazier designs to life. That said..... There is a WICKED learning curve to this thing. There's a 'help' menu that..... vaguely explains things. All of your learning is going to come from hands on experience, a ton of trial and error and just fooling around with everything. But it's WORTH IT. You can customize just about everything about it's looks. You can't really do much with the skeleton besides make it a little bigger. You can't make it smaller than the base size. I presume this is something they've thought about changing. I hope to see. Your appearance and armor have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with your actual stats and performance. So that's a big win there for everyone who likes to keep function and fashion as separate as possible. Pretty much the same deal for your weapons. Fighting style will be determined by the kind of Grip and Attachment. You CAN dual-wield, once you unlock it. You also get missile pods that DO let you fire off a bazillion missiles. Fun, once you figure out how they work, which does not get explained to you..... The Satellite weapons can pack a punch, once you figure out how they work. Yep. No explanation. But there's a pretty nice and GROWING variety of weapon components to experiment with. PLAY WITH THEM. Try them out! They can be pretty cool. My favorites are the Photons and Beam Slasher satellites. The STATS are unlocked in the Development tab. And it is NUTTY how in-depth they've gone with them. You can build and slot your stat boosts pretty much however you want, as long as you unlock the desired nodes. Nodes on the SKILLS TREES! These trees are intimidating at first glance. It's overwhelming to look at and there is almost nothing in the way of tutorials to explain how it works. Just that 'Help' window up in the corner. And..... it could be better. It's an amazing mecha creator wrapped around game play that is kinda..... Meh. It's OKAY? I mean..... It wouldn't be much fun to make the totally awesome giant robots of your dreams if you couldn't take them for a spin, right? Well, that's pretty much what you get here. Build it, take it out, try it out crucible style. Murder waves and waves of trash mobs and get your Main Character groove on..... Then get your butt broken by the bosses. Spoiler: The Blue bar is his shield.... Which needs to be broken before you can damage it. The Yellow bar is kind of like a Defiance bar? Break it and the boss will be stunned for brief period, and then you can start chipping away at the RED bar that is their actual HP. They don't explain this to you either. You're welcome. Good luck. And by the way? Gameplay is how you unlock more parts and components to make cooler robots. But once you unlock them? You can swap things in and out to your hearts content for free. The trick is trudging your way through the gameplay to do it. I think it's worth the effort. There's a TON of potential here. The gameplay is.... only 'okay'. It IS a game. It could be better. It's not completely unplayable but the learning curve is WICKED. But there's POTENTIAL. Devs: MORE TUTORIALS AND INSTRUCTION. These systems are not even a tiny bit intuitive and not really the most user friendly. Fix it. Please. Players.... Play with EVERYTHING. Goof around with sliders and create custom colors with patterns and just HAVE FUN with it. Get stupid. Clown around with it. That's the only way you're really gonna figure out how things work. But it's worth it, once you start getting the hang of it. Don't give up on this game. That goes for the devs too. I hear it's a VERY small team, so they'll need your patience and support. I genuinely believe this CAN get better. It's TOTALLY worth picking up, even if you just spend your time building. Give it a chance and HAVE FUN.

Customization took a bit to get the hang of, but once I did... 5 hours in, and I've been customizing the entire time. Sure I'll get to gameplay eventually, but for now I'm in Gunpla heaven. The level of intricate customization is insane. Make brain go BRRRRRRRRR. All of my YES.

Current recommendation is sitting at a no, why? they spent forever with a combat update, showed the differences, and when it arrived there were only differences in enemies, the promised combo speed, combat speed, and smoothness was not delivered as it was shown, as it was asked, or as it was promised. they are moving on from that now into something for guns without touching the melee combat more. Taking way too long to break promises so i will sit it on the back-shelf and change my recommendation later, if ever. BTW: dont watch the video on the steam page and be impressed its cut to appear attractive. EDIT: in october 2023 they admitted they did not succeed in the combat, they also said in the coming days it would be addressed. it has however not been part of any address that i have seen so far. 6 months later. they moved on through a dozen other things.

This game is so good... well, only when it comes to customization. Building and customizing your own mech is genuinely awesome. It really feels like you're creating your own machine to go kick some alien ass, and honestly, I spent way too much time messing around with different builds. But then there's the actual gameplay. Oh my god, the gameplay sucks. It's repetitive as hell, the story missions are a complete snoozefest, and most bosses feel less like bosses and more like target practice. The only part of the combat I actually enjoyed was the melee combat, but even that started getting old after about 5-6 hours. The main reason I ended up with over 10 hours in this game wasn't because I was having fun with the missions. It was because I kept going back to the customization menu to build new mechs. Customization: 8/10 Everything else: 2/10

The developers have not sent out physical backer rewards after the full 1.0 release, as they had promised, and have ignored requests for updates.

This game popped up in my updates bar in my library and it's been 2 years since I played it apparently. I scrolled through the list of updates since I last played... There's about 30 WIP updates (previews of upcoming content) and 2 actual game updates. The 2 game updates were each a year apart from their previous update. So to clarify there's been 2 updates in the past 2 years and content that was teased before the first update didn't make it into the game until the second. If you invest in this game you'll be waiting a year between updates and everything teased before that point isn't guaranteed to be in the update. I get the impression the developer loves the sound of his own voice. Each WIP teaser comes with an essay and tonnes of screenshots. After each game update, the next post in the feed is an "afterwords" essay from the developer describing their thoughts on the process. I think it's a red flag if the developer talks about "heated discussions" from their discord server. This is usually a sign of the playerbase asking for changes and the developer arguing against it. You will also encounter the developer's love of their voice in the poorly written story. The game tells you what you feel and how you react because it's being told from a first person perspective, so there are creepy moments where you are eavesdropping or "overhearing" conversations from the female only support cast... The mechs look absolutely fantastic and there's a near infinite number of combinations... These are bound by a very bland and small set of animations during combat. Parts are also locked behind an equally bland and boring grind. Furthermore, instead of using the awesome mechs as enemies you get the Quarks. An equally bland race of enemies that are multiplied and become bullet sponges as a way to increase difficulty. The objectives in the missions vary from "kill everything" to "kill everything faster" and my favourite "kill everything while staying here". There is of course the fan favourite "kill everything till you die" mode. All of which would be fine if it wasn't boring repetitive gameplay. Now that Armored Core 6 has been released don't bother with M.A.S.S. unless you like looking at a single mech you've created and that's it. The Dynasty Warriors Gundam series has much better combat with your favourite Gundams which you're probably gonna try to recreate in M.A.S.S anyways.

MASS Builder is basically poor-man's AC, minus the obnoxious difficulty. It combines Dynasty Warriors style combat with the frantic pace of Daemon X Machina in some very entertaining ways, all while keeping things relatively simple. Much like AC, you've got PARTS. Lots of 'em, in fact. You can spend hours alone just sifting through the parts you've unlocked, trying to piece together the world's dopest-looking mech. Aromor pieces all have weight, which can affect your overall movement speed, and fuel usage rate, so you do need to keep that in mind while building. This doesn't just include armor bits, either. You can create your own custom weapons, too. Wanna punch enemies with a lancehead? Do you want to shoot things in the face with a 1-handed shotgun? Would you, too, like to rain death and destruction down on your foes with a plasma machine gun? You can do all of that. You can even design custom parts with all the greeblies your dorky little heart desires. The same things can be said for your passive abilities, which can affect your stats in a myriad of ways. If you want a fast-moving mech that uses speed and high damage output to clear missions, you can build it. Or if you want to tank everything head-on with nothing but close-range weapons, you can do that, too. This can all be affected by your weight, so there are some genuine tactical choices to make. Now, that's all well and good, but the the missions might be where people start to lose interest. They tend to be fairly cut-and-paste, having you fight off a horde of enemies, tending to objective points, and then facing down a boss enemy and its respawning goons. Luckily for you, those bits and pieces you might want for your mech are being held by the enemy, so killing them can net you blueprints to unlock them, as well as net you some credits to dump into bettering your mech's selection of traits and abilities. Can the combat become tedious? Yes. Some missions, for example, have you fighting a horde of enemies that can't be damaged unless you destroy the crystal(s) empowering them. Others might have you running around the battlefield trying not the die, only to be stun-locked by an EMP mine. Others might have you trying to hit an enemy that's gotten stuck on the cliffs around the arena. The game has some issues when it comes to its gameplay quality, though anyone who's played DW games or DxM will be more than familiar with the potential downsides. But when you've gotten a mech put together that does what you want it to do? The gameplay is fast, fun, and mindlessly entertaining. Watching your overall damage numbers going up as you chain combos together, knocking enemies out and slurping up their drops like a madman, and ripping apart a boss in a flurry of blades and bullets can be a lot of fun. And even if you have issues with a level, you can change the difficulty. Speaking of difficulty: The game's best rewards are locked behind higher mission difficulty. Once you've gotten some experience under your belt, you can dive into a harder variant of the mission, fight stronger enemies, face a boss with a more aggressive moveset, and bag up all of those rarer blueprints and materials for your own use. This is great for those who want a mindless slaughter-fest, or for those who want to suffer for the ultimate mech drip. That being said: The game does suffer from its issues. There aren't any i-frames, so dodging isn't nearly as effective as it could be. You can block, but only with a one-handed weapon. Some missions are designed to be annoying (looking at you, EMP mines), and others are designed to be hell on higher difficulties (looking at YOU, void crystals). The game also doesn't explain some things very well, and the story is fairly generic. The price, too, is also a point of contention for some people. But is it a good game? Absolutely! I enjoy the feeling of just tearing through enemies with a blazing scythe, and gunning down one enemy after the next with my gatling gun and plasma rifle. I love making my mech look nice, while also making it the killiest thing on the field. It's also perfect for the Steam Deck, because I can clear a mission or two while on break at work! If you can get it on sale, do so. It's a great game, and it has a ton of potential that can only be made reality with more support.

If you're buying, know this from someone who enjoys the game; This mech game is more like building Gundam kits than anything. M.A.S.S. Builder prioritizes customization over game-play, which isn't bad, just niche! A big flaw: Combat is shallow and feels repetitive when unlocking new parts, but because you get a lot of new parts to buy per mission, you have to be committed to the excitement of designing things to keep it from being a mood killer. If you're looking for a "game", I'd suggest; Armored Core 6 / TitanFall 2 / Into The Breach / Mechabellum (maybe) If you're looking for a (bipedal only, so far) mech designing program/game, this is it. If you find it satisfying to draw up custom designs on paper and pencil and see if you can put that in a game, this is more for you, as it is for me!