LINCOLN CARPENTER, NEWS WRITER
This week: Spent a lot of time meditating on cool robots.
Online conversations about videogames have been strange lately. More so than usual, I mean. In pockets scattered around the internet, there’s been a pervasive fixation on the sense that some people, somewhere, might not love Crimson Desert—a game that sold over 4 million copies in less than two weeks and boasts a Very Positive rating on Steam after more than 108,000 reviews—as much as they should.
It’s not the first time I’ve watched review reactions metastasize in confusing ways, but the two weeks of psychosis about anyone thinking Crimson Desert is merely fine has felt particularly surreal, because I’ve spent that time contentedly enjoying a game that many think—with good reason—is terrible. I’ve been playing Mobile Suit Gundam Battle Operation 2, a game the world hates, and I am nonetheless at peace.
GBO 2 has an abysmal reputation, and it’s earned it. It launched on Steam in 2023 as the shoddy PC port of a five year-old free-to-play mecha shooter, burdened with rancid monetization schemes, constant networking issues, and a thoroughly unapproachable style of gameplay that together quickly tanked its hopes of attracting a healthy PC player base.
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GBO 2 isn’t a very good videogame. But it’s good at providing a lot of what I’m looking for from a Gundam game.
It doesn’t run well. Playing it with a controller feels at first like something is deeply wrong, and with a mouse it’s even worse. Navigating its hub area and tangle of menus is a stilted, shuddering headache. What player base it does have is nestled in the upper echelons of its ranked playlists, where matchmaking for low-ranked players can regularly take 10 full minutes—minutes that will be wasted if somebody disconnects midmatch, immediately ending the game for everyone else in the lobby. You could stick to private matches, sure, but be careful: If you leave one early, you’re still at risk of finding yourself on the receiving end of an automated temporary ban.
GBO 2 bears a damning Mostly Negative rating on Steam, where across all languages just 21% of its 21,000 reviews are positive. Destructoid, the only English-speaking outlet of note to bother reviewing it, gave the PS4 version a stinging 3/10 in 2019.
But me? I’ve been having a great time with it.
Good garbage
If you visit the GBO 2 Steam page and skim the text accompanying those many, many downward-pointing thumbs, you’ll find the criticisms I echoed above and more besides. But you’ll also see a surprising number of those negative reviews saying it’s “still one of the most mechanically satisfying” mecha games or praising the “weight and intention” of its mobile suit clashes.
In its dire reception, I didn’t see much that led me to think GBO2 was something a broad audience would be into—but I recognized plenty that resonates with my tastes. The reviewers are right that GBO 2 isn’t a very good videogame. But it’s good at providing a lot of what I’m looking for from a Gundam game.
I’ve been on a prolonged Gundam kick for a couple years, rekindling a fascination that had lain dormant since I was a preteen. But despite stirring those brainworms into a frenzy with a watch-through of the first three anime series and a growing pile of gunpla kits, I’ve been struggling to find Gundam games that hit me in the way I’d like.
Gundam’s Universal Century, the first and most-revisited of its fictional settings, strikes a unique balance between anime excess and a reverence for grounded machine physicality that more modern Gundam media doesn’t always share. Even when UC Gundam culminates in something like space magic, the character of its war machines is rooted in a material context of squealing hydraulics, armor weights, and the whims of military maintenance logistics.
Universal Century visual designs are everywhere in Gundam games, but its character is harder to find. Gundam Evolution was a capable enough hero shooter before its shutdown, and Gundam Breaker 4 is a delightful toybox for tinkering with mecha designs—but neither of them really captured UC Gundam’s particular atmosphere and style of mechanical heft.
Where those arguably better games failed, however, GBO 2 succeeds. It suffers from microtransaction pressures, matchmaking frustrations, and fumbled port execution, yes, and it deserves those criticisms. But its combat and mechanics—if you’re willing to acclimate to their peculiar rhythm and expectations—somehow manage to deliver the best available rendition of the physicality and momentum specific to Gundam’s Universal Century.
Mobile suits move with multi-ton mass, limiting how quickly even the most nimble Gundams and Gelgoogs can adjust their targeting or recover from a weapon swing. Learning to cooperate with that inertia, however, brings the satisfaction of drilling a distant Gouf with a perfectly-timed beam rifle shot. Thruster boosts and melee lunges can achieve a surprising speed, but overcommitting can leave yourself open to an inopportune counterattack that’ll send all that armored weight toppling helplessly to the ground.
The dozens of UC mecha designs on the GBO 2 roster are recognizable, but more importantly, there’s an attention to the material context and evolution of those mobile suits and their armaments that’s translated into how they move and fight in-game.
In a match of GBO 2, you can only field suits with cost ratings—a rough measurement of a mecha’s capabilities—that meet the match’s criteria. Going from a match where early generation GMs and Zakus are pitted against each other with their plodding mobility and limited armaments feels like an entirely different style of warfare compared to a match between Moon Gundams and Sinanjus—late-era ace pilot suits armed to the teeth with bespoke arsenals of experimental weaponry.
And that sense of mass and momentum is only amplified in the tense occasions where I have to leave my mobile suit mid-match, leaving me completely vulnerable on a battlefield where the apocalyptic scale of mecha combat has, in an instant, become nightmarishly clear.
That feeling of physical, mechanical substance extends outside of combat. While I still only have a tenuous grasp of the web of relevant in-game currencies, GBO 2 has tuning and parts-based upgrade systems offering such granular adjustments to combat specifications—from heat management to sighting recovery—that it lends even those Gundams with remote-controlled psychic death lasers a believable sense of tangible, modifiable machinery.
What are reviews for?
Playing what most of the world thinks is a bad game hasn’t just been fun for me—it’s been useful. When something is satisfying for me in a way that’s out of step with the consensus about a game or a reviewer’s score, it helps solidify my sense of what I’m actually looking for in a game more than it would to see another 8 or 9 rating slapped on a game I already know I like.
Despite GBO 2’s reception, playing it has left me with a better understanding of the kinds of combat weightiness, systems design, and mechanical physicality that match my tastes well enough to outweigh what someone else would rightly criticize. And if I see those notes echoed in another game’s reviews in the future—even if that review doesn’t juice its Metacritic ranking—I’ll know it might resonate with me in the same way, whether or not it would be crap to someone else. If you trust yourself to recognize what speaks to you, there’s more value in a review than its score.
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