YMMV / New Gundam Breaker

• Cliché Storm: The story often get criticized for being very by the numbers as far as high-school club plotlines go.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Triple Beam Shot ranged weapons like the Nu Gundam's or the AGE-FX's rifles. Even if you go with a Close-Combat oriented build and play style, their ease of use and high base damage allow you to obliterate through an enemy player or boss's life bar before you move in for the kill, let alone tearing through the fodder.
  • Bazooka weapons with splash damage like the Virtue's GN Bazooka can also become those due to their Part Break power and how they can easily juggle many enemies into the air at once.
• Obvious Beta: The initial release of the game was infamously buggy and had a lot of hallmarks of being unfinished. The Steam version was originally supposed to launch simultaneously with the PS4 version, but the disastrously negative reception forced Bandai Namco to delay it for several months as patches were developed. When it was finally released on Steam, it was with all the patches developed to fix bugs and issues with the PS4 version.
• Old Guard Versus New Blood: New Gundam Breaker was apparently designed to tap into the "live service" or "E-sports" models, the idea being that players would work together in fast-paced matches. To facilitate this, instead of straightforward combat like in previous games, objectives were now variations on "collect this item/part" or "destroy X number of enemies". The idea of collecting orbs in order to charge the player MS's abilities was apparently intended for competitive balance, as was restricting the number of abilities from the 8 of the previous game to a mere 4 in this game. Tellingly, the pre-existing fans rejected the new direction completely, and the game itself was so bad that newer fans never materialised (or were at least convinced by older ones to go play the older games instead).
• Polished Port: The Steam release was delayed so that it was the version with all of the patches the initial console release got. Unfortunately, many reviewers pointed out that while it did play much better than the initial console release, the game had fundamental issues no amount of polishing was going to help.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The ability to swap parts mid-battle. At best it means that players lose their carefully coordinated design for a negligible stat boost, which would be easy enough to ignore... If it weren't for two things. First, the fact that as a consequence, players can only pick up so many parts before going to a container to save them. Meaning actually acquiring parts (you know, the entire point of the game) is incredibly tedious. Secondly, if a player loses a part, rather than it just coming back eventually or picking it up, they will automatically equip any compatible part they come across. These two things mean that players may be avoiding parts they're not interested in more than they're avoiding enemy fire. The Burst mechanic also causes you to purge and drop the parts equipped on the go to bring back the suit's loadout back, further contributing to the mechanic's scrappiness.
  • The Inner Frames. On paper, their idea is simple: You choose the frame corresponding to whichever play style suits your mech and/or the mission ahead, choose two power ups and level them up through experience earning. In execution, 3 of those frames end up so extreme in their specialization that they turn you into a Glass Cannon or a Stone Wall, leading to players keeping the Balanced Frame, or going with Searcher Frame due to the better stats balancing across them.
  • Builder Parts' Buffs and Debuffs. Unlike Breaker 3, Builder Parts are now mostly cosmetic save for carrying a set of stat buffs and debuffs - which can be toggled off. Not only does the functionality trade not pay off, but the variety of buff/debuff sets across the plethora of Builder Parts is downright pitiful.
  • Forcing players to collect energy orbs to recharge skills, abilities and/or special weapons (as opposed to them recharging automatically) was seen as needlessly overcomplicating combat, since players now had to spend the first few minutes of any match smashing crates and hoping to get enough energy to actually use their assigned abilities etc.
  • Restricting players to only four Actions (a Head Actions, an Arm Action, a Body Action and a Leg Action) was seen as a massive step down to the previous game (that allowed for up to 8 different Actions). It especially crippled parts that had multiple weapons or moves. For example, when equipping the backpack of the Strike Freedom Gundam (equipped with railguns, beam cannons and Dragoons, the player can only utilise one of those weapons.
• Tainted by the Preview: What's happening to the Steam version. Having the PS4 version launch three months before the Steam version tainted a lot of people's views of the game. Even with the updates, many fans are adamant to not get the game. This puts everyone in a Morton's Fork: either you don't support the game and buy Gundam Breaker 3 instead in a "giving Bandai Namco the middle finger" action and risk not getting any other Gundam games or you buy the game and risk telling Bandai Namco "I like this gamestyle."
• That One Level:
  • Any pair mission that ends with a Main "Destroy 4 of the Target Mobile Suit" Quest, if you're aiming for the S-Rank Part Reward. Not because of their difficulty, far from it, but because the Rank System is based on how many points you've earned completing quests before winning a mission. Add an RNG that loves to make this Quest pop up 8 to 10 points (roughly 3 to 4 quests) before you reach the intended 15, combined with the AI's priority to either shoot down whatever enemy attacks it first, or whichever Quest is at the top of the priority list - in which the Main Quest is always assured to be at - and this leads into you repeating the same mission over and over to get that one Rank.
  • The Forest Base level. Even with the teleports becoming active as the quests go on, navigating from Area to Area is slow, tedious and sometimes confusing. Not helping are how random the Neutral Forces spawns can get around the map, forcing you to go around the entire map to find them or use the Searcher Frame Ability.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Whoo, boy. Using a brand new team and a brand new engine lead to the entire franchise being upended with new workings. Coming off of the majorly popular Gundam Breaker 3, many fans felt that it was a heavy step back, with many changes no one asked for and no one enjoying. The series' premise is straightforward: break Gundam, build Gundam and the changes to the mechanics made both of those aspects less enjoyable.
  • To reiterate how badly this game was received, used copies flooded game shops alongside brand new copies within the first week of its release. Amazon reviews were almost universally negative (along with choice quotes like "This isn't a game, it's a stress test!" or "Show me who thought that this would be fun?!"). Just about the only positive reviews came from those for whom New Gundam Breaker was their first Gundam Breaker game.