It's a mech-builder game, and it's cheap.
The combat is average; light and floaty and handles more like a dynasty warriors game. You feel more like you're playing as a some dude wear mech-flavored armor.
Despite there being no advantages or disadvantages to making a cool mech, if you like making your favorite mech (Gundam, Transformers, Macross, Patlabor, Pacific Rim, etc...) you can do it here, with better results than most other games.
I built a sizable number of my favorite Gundams and several personal units. They all look cool and function well. The tuning system lets your mech function in any way you want with the right parts. And while there could be more parts to really get the right look, you can get close enough with enough patience and experimentation.
The game has pretty good music most of the time.
Now, here comes the list of negatives.
Building your mech's aesthetic armor requires lots of different shapes and parts. You don't know whether a specific part is a good fit until you buy the schematic for it and the good parts aren't cheap. As such, unless you're using the prefab set pieces you won't be playing 80% of the game's story with the mech of your dreams until you're able to farm a lot of money to buy them.
The part building system is also not explained at all. Since it's vital for constructing custom-built armors, that's important. I saw a youtube video that showed someone doing it and figured it out from there.
Another problem is the dialogue. The story has... good bones. But the dialogue between the characters and the pacing of the story is absolutely terrible. They need a native english speaker to translate their stuff because someone will be talking about a cat and the next message is unprompted rage.
One of the engineer guys speaks with what I think is supposed to be a scottish accent, but only for the first line of his dialogue and then loses it for most of the conversation until the writer remembers that they're supposed to sound different, only to give them a completely different accent.
The player character has no identity, no lines, no dialog choices and seems to be wholly useless.
There's a whole lot of important information about the world, lore, characters, etc.. somewhere in the game. I found it once, then lost it.
Game naming terminology is especially bad. With names like "Bullet Shooters", "Energy Shooters" and "Bullet Launchers". Which, while [i]technically[/i] correct, are abhorrent to any native english speaker as the words of a very young child who doesn't know the [i]right[/i] names for things.
Even the title acronym M.A.S.S is... cringeworthy when you see it.
Mechanical Assault Skeleton Suit. Terrible. No weapon engineer is going to give anything a name like that. It's neither a skeleton, nor a suit, are used for non-assault purposes (cargo) and isn't operated using cogs and gears.
Mechanized Autonomous Strike System: One of a dozen possible permutations of M.A.S.S that don't cause profound nausea to read.
The tuning system has completely unformatted upgrade descriptions. Just a stream of vague effects with no line breaks: "On hit chance to trigger X", On which hit? When I hit them? When they hit me? What's the chance? 1%? 25%? How is that useful?
Then the next, completely unrelated effect from that "item" will continue on from there instead of being on a separate line. It's a mess.
The enemies... aren't good. They're either easily killed or bullet sponges. The individual units don't have identifiable names, so you're going be calling them generic things like "Punchy", "Dragon" and "Teleporting bastard". "Quarks" is a terrible name for the enemy. They're made of "void particles", so just call them "VOIDs" like a normal JRPG. "Quark" is a nerdy, scientific term (or a ferengi bartender), not the name you give to the enemy of the world.
Either way, combat isn't particularly satisfying. You don't feel heavy like a 700-ton mecha and enemies don't perform any sort of complex behavior... or look cool most of the time.
All the melee weapons function more or less the same. Despite using various bladed weapons, spears, axes, hammers, knuckledusters, there is little to no difference to the animation and no different damage types beyond the generic "melee", bullet and plasma.
The element system is underdeveloped, not explained at all, and badly implemented. It doesn't really matter since 90% of your damage is just your raw numbers; while elemental damage seems to detract your raw damage numbers and add a separate elemental damage (with no bonus to counter the obvious loss in overall numbers). Most enemies don't even have an elemental weakness, so it's moot.
Despite the desire to multiclass and swing a sword, fire a gun and launch rockets from your back as all new players will want to do. You will be actively punished for doing this.
Focus on one specific weapon type and put everything into that. It's not as fun, but will get you to the end.
tl;dr
Building a mech is great, once you know how to attach the individual parts and can afford the blueprints. If you're the creative type, you can make pretty much any mech you want. You can even pose it in a variety of backdrops and poses and take photos.
Combat is flat and largely unsatisfying. There are some fun missions later on, where it's you vs waves of enemies and the clock.
Multiplayer is a myth. It doesn't exist.
The game's writing and naming is bad and inconsistent.
The game is cheap. That's a good thing. If you get it on sale, it's definitely worth it. More than Gundam Breaker.
MASS Builder could be so much better. It probably wouldn't take much more than rewriting some of the in-game text, and rebalancing a lot of the stat numbers. But... you can't do either of those.
