A good, easy to pick up game.
Graphics, well it's not a top notch game; no high dollar budget, no huge publicity and with that in mind the graphics are kosher. Everything has a fair amount of detail in it, but it's hardly anything that you'd get an aneurism over.
The environments are fairly nice, especially the city levels. There's the standard Jaburo level as well, where you can take your mobile suit underwater and fight, or play in the trees. The robots themselves look nice, too. Though periodically they'll look very digital. This game does suffer from some slowdown, however. And I really think that it's time Gundam games started working on their explosions... I mean really, how can you keep the same lame effects all the time?
The sound of the game is pretty well done. Now, if you're not a fan of the series, you probably would just hate the music. If you are a fan, you'll appreciate the list of tracks. The Gundams make their almost trademark noises, and explosions sound nice. But I feel that everything could have been a lot sharper and more fun to listen to.
Now onto the real reason to play the game; the action. When it comes to fighting in your machine, they game shines. While it can get pretty easy to just dodge, shoot, and repeat. If you let the situation develop, or turn the difficulty up, you can find yourself fairly frantic trying to deal with your adversaries. Not the most difficult game, no, but blowing up an opposing foe is pretty damn satisfying for the most part. There are several gameplay modes that are more of the same, and I had a little fun taking characters that were killed off in the original timeline into the new one, but there is a lot about the Gundam stories that don't get conveyed her. It's very cut and dry; "Here's the history, here's some dialogue, now fight!!" is what it amounts to. I really feel they should put in more effort into telling the story. Encounters in space had some of that, but lacked the simplistic and hectic gameplay this has. It seems that the developers are not looking to mix the two elements....
If you are looking for a game with great gameplay and big robots, this is definitely the game to pick up. At the very least it's worth a rental, even for non fans. At most, if you are a Gundam fan, like me, then you'll need to buy this, as you'll find yourself going back to it like any of your favorite games. If only it was more polished...