M.A.S.S. Builder

This game first and foremost is a mecha builder, similar to Break Arts II where the core gameplay is a bit shaky but the customisation is epic. My opinion on the game will be very harsh, as I understand it can change and improve. I will review this review once features change. Firstly, this suffers from what I call "invincibility difficulty". The bosses are not hard because they have mechanics to learn, telegraphed attacks or need to counter by attacking weakpoints, but because they all have shields, invincibility phases and some cases literally moving away from the map so you can't hurt them. While it is achievable, it's not fun gameplay as it devolves to just shooting while staying far away or farming Quantum Break on mobs. There is no other interesting feature in the combat loop, which is a waste as Quantum Break feels unique and cool. I understand that devs may want to focus on expanding the customisation rather than make a deep and complex battle system, but I would just suggest removing the giant bullet shields as it does nothing when the main source of big damage is melee and bullets are extremely limited. Another gripe is that you are constantly fighting the lock-on system, the lock-on drops nearly arbitrarily or when the enemy is obscured by 1px of terrain. This makes ranged combat unnecessarily difficult, as shielded enemies will quickly recover their shields while you pray to the lock-on gods to actually keep lock. A fix is to simply tell the player that the target is obscured rather than dropping lock, especially when seeking missiles can often fly over and hit them anyways. Something nice would be able to lock onto boss weakpoint and torse and not their just their feet. For melee combat, the main problem is guarding. I understand that shielding should be stronger where you face, but this is confusing if it is not based on the camera. I more or less ignore this feature due to this and opt to spec into speed which lets me just emergency boost out rather than pray that I get 70% damage reduction. I would suggest to change this mechanic to be more engaging with a shield energy meter, draining as long as it is deployed, dropping from 100-10% effectiveness. A mod then can be "Recover 20% guard energy when blocking attacks within a short period of guarding, guard energy drains 30% faster." to allow more interesting gameplay options with Guarding rather than just "the shield class gets buffs from dropping guard." Difficulty rewards are also pretty pathetic, I would rather play easy for the grind instead of higher difficulty. Otherwise Difficulty simply being more enemies and more damage taken is fine by me. Though it would be nice if some enemies also got new features because of it (e.g. missile pod enemy doesn't just lob projectiles, when approached it can "disengage" by rolling back and dropping a timed bomb where the player must avoid. I guess to clarify, the most "rewarding" difficulty I find is after challenge modes, where Hard mode in campaign or hunt is pretty tedious.