Wuthering Waves Review 2026 – Is It Finally Worth Playing?

Wuthering Waves have been out for well over 2 years by now and my initial thoughts about the game were somewhere in the middle. I found it to be a nice looking game with a decent experience but the constant grind wasn’t appealing to me. As a matter of fact, I found it extremely boring. 

Especially with the limited character and echo pool. I’ve also noted a few other things that need improving and I even suggested a few things that would make the game 10x better. To my surprise everything that I said would make the game better, was eventually implemented into the game. Not that I had anything to do with it but it feels nice knowing I was right about it all. 

I’ve been playing Wuthering Waves since day one, I’ve been with it from its humble beginning, all the way to what seems to be one of the best gacha games on the market. They’ve set a new level of quality that honestly, not many gaming companies can follow.

It’s a good game but it still has its flaws and to be perfectly fair and not sound like I’m just glazin’ Wuthering Waves, I’ve spent over 50 hours last week playing the game, following the story, doing random quests, farming, collecting for summons and so much more. And here’s everything you should know about Wuthering Waves in 2026.

Developers	Kuro Games
Release Date	May 23, 2024
Platforms	PC, Android, iOS, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S
Game Size	~83.06 GB
Pull Rates	0.8% drop rate for 5-star and a 6% drop rate for 4-star. Pity cap at 80 pulls.

Wuthering Waves Story

If you were one of the selected few to read my previous review of 1.0 Wuthering Waves, you would know how little I understood about the story of the game. For some reason only known to me, I thought Rover had a little fight with his girl, fell, and in the process lost his memory completely. After 2 years of active development the story has advanced exponentially and reached new heights that I thought weren’t possible for a live-service game. 

I’ll be honest with you, most of the time, I’ll try to follow the story and be a good boy but I’ll more often than not reach a boiling point where I just skip the conversations. Especially if my progress is tied to main quests and I got a brand new shiny toy that needs something in area from chapter 4 and I’m way behind. 

I’m sorry, but the story is getting rushed. Anyways the point is Wuthering Waves absolutely understands players like me and respects my decision. They’ll usually summarize what happened in a few sentences and if there’s something really intense or absolutely cinematically cool, they won’t let you skip just so you don’t miss it. 

This way, I’ve stayed up-to-date with the most important scenes and just skipped boring details and unnecessary bickering. For this reason and the absolute best quality animations of the story of Wuthering Waves gets a huge thumbs up from me. 

Wuthering Gameplay

Wuthering Waves is an open-world RPG that revolves around fast-paced combat, character switching, exploration, and a gacha system that will drain your wallet completely if you let it. While the game shares similarities with Genshin Impact and other gacha games, it’s in a league on its own. And what makes it great isn’t one singular thing, it’s many. 

Combat

Let’s start with one of the best features that it has to offer and believe it or not, it’s combat. Well, it’s sort of related to combat. Let’s be honest here, the combat of Wuthering Waves isn’t the most challenging thing in the world but it sure is fun. 

Fighting regular mobs is usually done in a quick manner but fighting bosses will take considerably more time. Especially if you’re someone like me and running undergeared most of the time. Even with all my lack of proper echoes, gear and upgrades, I’ve managed to beat all of the bosses without much hassle. Granted, it takes longer and you can’t just stand there like a motionless puppet. 

Back to the point I was trying to make, it’s fun because the combination of different characters in my team paired with new improved enemy bosses that are getting introduced with each new patch. I’ve played it since the beginning, invested so many hours as F2P, I’ve faced many great bosses and picking just one is an impossible task. With each introduction of the new cool enemy, I thought “It can’t get better than this” and guess what, somehow it did.  

Open World

The Wuthering Waves open world is like no other. Somehow developers have succeeded in doing the impossible. In one moment we are in a swamp filled with ruins surrounded by mist.  Then we are in a land with huge medieval castles, which naturally leads to a huge thing in the air that resembles the city of Venice. 

After that we are in the middle of a modern Tokyo which naturally leads to a futuristic metropolis that introduces a lot of new characters, echoes, and few new tools, including a motorcycle that can run on water and fly for a limited time. But you can only use it while in that specific area. 

Back in 1.0 I made a suggestion of making Inferno Rider a permanent transformation but they’ve gone in another direction. It’s a nice start, but now let’s make it usable in every region. 

What’s even better is that all the different areas are populated with unique Echos, treasure chests, various quests and challenges. No matter how long I play it, there’s always something new to be discovered. I genuinely believe that you could play it for months and still not be able to find and clear everything that the open world of Wuthering Waves has to offer.  

Echoes

Echoes are a huge part of the game and they’re the one of the main things that separate Wuthering Waves from any other gacha. They’re monsters that were defeated, captured and can be equipped as part of gear/armor. They offer standard stats like hp,attack,crit rate, crit damage and elemental boosts. Also they can be leveled and new stats can be acquired but it’s luck based, so getting the right stats will require enormous amounts of time and resources. 

What makes it even more special is that you can summon or transform into the main echo that you equipped by pressing a designated button. Some of them can do damage, a few give buffs and some of them can be used to heal your team. It’s one of those things where you simply must test every echo for yourself to experience every transformation that the game has to offer.   

Characters

The characters in Wuthering Waves are known as the Resonators. They can either be  4-star or a 5 star. All of the resonators can be put in one of six attributes: Fusion, Glacio, Aero, Electro, Spectro, and Havoc. 

Each character has its own basic attack (light and heavy attack), a resonator skill and ultimate skill that needs to be charged over time. The team consists of 3 members where you can interchange them during a combat to deal more damage or keep them alive. 

I’m playing as a F2P player and getting every character is virtually impossible but I’ve managed to gather a few of them and I’ve personally tested the rest of them through a trial. So when I say that early characters are nowhere near as impressive as new ones, I know what I’m talking about. 

There’s an obvious difference in character and skill design/animation between old and new characters. The skill animation and design of newer characters will leave you in absolute awe, while the old ones are, for the lack of a better word, just meh. Which kinda shows how much this game improved since beginning but also they should have improved other characters and mechanics too, they’re still part of the game. I hope they see this and address this issue in the future. 

Gacha Element and Monetization

Honestly, I’ll try my best to avoid being biased but take in consideration that as of recently, RNG was extremely good to me. I’ve gotten 1 five-star in 10 pulls then 2 five-stars in another 10 pulls and one more in the next 10 pulls. Also a 5-star featured weapon in 20 pulls. I don’t know what’s happening but my luck has been really good recently and if you know my journey with gacha games, this never happens. At least not to me. 

Wuthering Waves rates seem fair from what I witnessed and according to many of their players, the pity system 50/50 is something that rarely happens and most players get desired character on first pity. With that said, getting resources to summon is extremely difficult in my humble opinion. Especially as you get later in the game and try to optimize your characters more. But that’s just a normal gacha for you. 

Graphics and Audio

Wuthering Waves’ biggest strength is the quality of visuals it possesses. It is genuinely a beautiful game but its best visuals don’t come from an open world. It’s all about the character designs, animations, combat effects, and cinematic moments. That’s where the game really shows how great it is. Some environments can look amazing but the world itself isn’t as consistent as the characters in it. 

As for audio, the game features really cool soundtracks that know when to give you that sense of coziness and serenity but also to know when to hype it up because something wicked is going to happen. The only bad thing I’ve gotta say is that there’s a slight delay when it comes to voice-overs of characters, where once you see it, you can’t go back. 

Conclusion

My initial report of Wuthering Waves was inconclusive, I was somewhere in between loving and hating it. I had so many things that I wanted improved/added and to my surprise they’ve done it all. Not because they like me or anything but because it was a logical thing to do. Nowadays, my relationship with Wuthering Waves is healthy, I’ve always logged in when there’s something new to do. And I’m at the point where I can happily recommend it to anyone who is looking for a cool open-world gacha game that respects your time.