Wuthering Waves from the Players' Perspective

Let's take a look at Wuthering Waves from the players' perspective.

Strengthening Your Character

They hit just as hard, too, provided you can equip them with the right gear to boost their damage. Rather than using traditional gear like helmets and gloves, you can use Echoes to power up your character: animal-like companions that increase your attack power, elemental damage, and more. The strength of these buffs depends on how many items of the same type you equip at once, and each Echo takes up a limited amount of space in your gear slots. These limitations pushed me to strategize and squeeze the most out of the space I had, even if that meant temporarily using Echoes with less-than-ideal properties. Tuning, the process of unlocking additional properties for Echoes, unlocks those properties at random. This makes optimizing Echoes more difficult, but I didn't find it to be too much of a hindrance—it's more of a bonus than a necessity.

Closely integrated with the environment

The best thing about Echoes is how they integrate with the environment. As you fight enemies and bosses, they'll sometimes leave behind ghostly shells for you to absorb and transform into Echoes. I felt more drawn to explore, because finding different types of monsters could mean acquiring Echoes with new effects. This system not only rewards you with interesting gear for your character, but it also encourages you to fill out the map as you explore. Catching Echoes even earns you points toward collecting tracking guides, as well as a battle pass filled with rewards, so there's a reason to hunt them in addition to improving your stats. Be sure to catch them all!

Chasing echoes

Chasing echoes also inspired me to keep fighting enemies in the surface world, even when I could beat them with a high-level team. Clearing out smaller enemies like this is especially satisfying when every part of the map is brand new and shiny. However, after playing Wuthering Waves for more than 30 hours, taking down the same enemies over and over did start to feel repetitive, even as I continued to explore new parts of the map. On the bright side, at least you can farm echoes as much as you want - which is much better than Genshin Impact's artifact system, which is locked behind a daily currency.