If I asked you what the contender for one of the best gotacha releases this year, I bet this game would not be one of them. Black Beacon is the first gotacha game released in 2025 that I spend money on and will be personally playing myself. This is one of the most major underdogs when it comes to the freshly released titles in recent memory. Having completely evaded my most anticipated top five list for 2025, I was shocked to find that there is a pretty low level of coverage surrounding this game. My name is Psyche and let me introduce the gotacha game that barely got any media attention this year. I will be breaking down the gameplay progression, gotcha, and monetization to answer the question, is Black Beacon any good? Let's begin. Right off the bat, let me first put a dent in the game's perfect track record. For whatever reason, the game did not launch with an official PC client, and they have gone out of their way to ban most emulators on PC. As you might imagine, not everyone has a good phone for gaming, and given its action-intensive gameplay, not having the ability to use a keyboard or controller doesn't bode well. This alone is going to be a turnoff for some players. Now, me, modern problems require modern solutions. So, I was able to gather some footage by casting my Red Magic 10 Pro to my desktop and binding the keys there. This is a phone that I bought with my own money, as you've seen in my previous videos. So, I'm happy to give a quick shout out to Red Magic for sponsoring the video. Introducing the newlyannounced Red Magic 10 Air. This is a serious contender for the best mid-range gaming phone out right now. It features the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, 120 Hz refresh rate, liquid metal cooling, and up to 16 GB RAM, and 512 GB of internal storage. Slimmer than the 10 Pro, the 10 Air also contains a 6,000 millia battery with 80 watt fast charging, meaning that it has a battery life of 28 hours and can charge from 0 to 100% in just under an hour. As you can see, this phone does not have a camera notch since it's embedded behind the screen to make your gaming and viewing experience smoother. One of the most unique characteristics about Red Magic phones is the two shoulder triggers on the side of the device. You can bind set buttons to anything on the screen so you can free up your hands during gameplay. Holding the red button on the side, you will enter Red Magic's dedicated game space where the phone will optimize itself for gaming. From there, you can pick between different performance modes. One of my favorite features is charge separation. Given that a lot of mobile games will drain the battery fast, enabling it while plugged into a power source will charge the phone but not the battery. This ensures that the battery doesn't overheat and better maintains its integrity. If you're slightly tight on budget but want a mid-range gaming phone with outstanding performance, the Red Magic 10 Air just might be for you. I know I can personally vouch for their quality because I purchased one of their phones myself. So, use the link in the description or pin comment to learn more. Thanks to Red Magic for the sponsor and let's get back to the review. The developer for Black Beacon is Mingo Technology, which according to their website contains former developers from Punishing Gay Raven. This is the team's first major project, so let's hope their expertise from PGR can shine through here as well. The game was released on April 10th with no official PC port just yet. For the record, this review is not affiliated with the game developers, so the content of this review is for my own opinions. This is also a first impressions review for my 15 hours of play time. So, there's no guarantee that late game content will be covered thoroughly. Starting the game, I tried inputting my username as usual, except the game seems to believe that it contained sensitive information. Damn, I guess my name is just too offensive. This is the first game that has done this so far, so it's already breaking new ground. People wanted me to continue with critiquing the story in Gach games. So, here's the brief rundown on the overall premise of my thoughts about Black Beacon's story. The protagonist is your amnesiac looking for information pertaining to their past. A mysterious man named Cosmos hands you a keepsake that will let you enter a tower in the distance that reaches all the way towards the sky known as the library of Babel. He says that the tower presents the repository of humankind and you may find the information you're looking for if you explore it. Upon entering a small group of people greet you. It's then that you realize that the keepsake cosmos left you represents the authority of these librarians and you must be a figure of great importance. Just as your greeting ends, the beacon in the middle of the tower starts to activate. Amidst the chaos, a giant monster attacks and flings you into the wall. Having lost consciousness, you wake up and find a mysterious pink-haired girl and a colossal golden sphere. As the sphere spins and radiates its glow, the girl says that the sphere is an ancient technology that's about to destroy the tower. And the only way to stop it is learning the command to halt the machine. It turns out you have the power to time travel. And this is the doomed future that you're here to prevent. Pushing you off the ledge. You then wake back up in present day knowing what fate will befall this tower. It's your job as the seer to travel to different time periods in search of a solution to prevent this catastrophe. I completed the story line up to chapter 5 by launch and it's honestly one of the most intriguing ones I've seen. You got these loces and environment designs befitting of different eras. The characters that you meet in set eras all have their own charm and intellect to help you on your journey. It does throw you off quite a little bit in the beginning with jargon and confusing moments, but as you progress later, you'll start to see how these pieces all come together, making you think, "Oh, so that was the twist." In terms of world building, Black Beacon does a solid job of this. The story was one that I enjoyed from beginning to end. Those character designs also follow their themes where the librarians within the tower share the same muted colors of black and white as their outfits, but the characters from an eastern local wear their own style of clothing. So far, Black Beacon has nailed the two elements that I look for in terms of personal enjoyment in a gacha. But how does it hold up mechanically? Black Beacon is an action RPG where the camera is fixed in a top- down perspective. However, if you zoom in on the screen, you can change the viewing angle to third person. Each character can normal attack, has two skills they can use, and an alt. Usually, there is a certain rotation that the game will nudge you to do that activates the character's passives, and certain levels allow you to use the power of Zawarudo, so your opponents don't get to play the game for a bit. Dodging perfectly gives eyeframes and slows down time so you get a free hit. Each team consists of three members, and you can swap to them to perform their alt immediately. Having played the game for the past week, I think there's actually quite a lot of skill expression you can pull off. Granted, this is a mobile game, so you can't expect the mechanics to be that complicated. But I was pleasantly surprised just how each character felt different to play. This is not an openw world game, but I was also impressed by the level and environment designs. Each local feels distinct, and they clearly worked a lot on making it feel that you're traversing through time and space in different eras. The UI, artwork, and sound design are also very polished. For whatever reason though, the story voiceovers only have English and Chinese for now, even though there is a Japanese voiceover just for menu interactions and combat. Maybe that's coming out later. At launch, the game had six chapters in the story already out, and it's not gated by progression, meaning that if you beat the previous chapters, you can go straight to the next. Certain farming stages and upgrades are level gated, though. Sweep function unlocks when you three star clear a stage. Has the classic stamina system for 240 units. Characters can be leveled and ascended, both using their respective currencies. Same thing goes for weapons. The level cap for both should be 90, assuming you follow the patterns for the ascension levels. Limit breaks go up to six additional copies. Skills can be upgraded to 10. Very typical stuff so far. You get a new skin when you reach a certain affection level. It's just a pallet swap, but at least it's something. When I started, I was anticipating an additional tab to show up here since I was noticing a lack of an RNG relic system. Sure enough, the tab called ancient mark unlocked. Basically, you get a grid where you can fit different pieces of these marks onto it. The more real estate it takes up, the more bonuses it gives. I'm not too deep into the system yet, but essentially, you get the currency to get these marks from a separate mode. Then, when you buy the mark, it will provide a random stat to give alongside the main effect if it has one. This means there is a degree of RNG involved here. However, you can also merge the same mark types together where you will combine them and get both the respective stat boosts. The system that's the most equivalent to this that comes to mind will be reverse 1999's resonance mechanic. The main difference is that you farm from materials that you can use to upgrade a character's resonance level. And all the pieces are just given to you. Whereas here, you have a bit more freedom in selecting which pieces to buy to fit the grid. There's not nearly as much RNG involved as a full-on relic system with sub stats, but the ancient mark mechanic does have one layer of rolling sub stats that you do have to worry about. Overall, it's fairly tame. I understand that you need this sort of thing for player retention. I'll be taking the time figuring this stuff out, but I find it's really not as bad as some of the other RNG relics out there. Daily missions are integrated into the battle pass. They take virtually no time to do as of now, given how easy sweeping levels are. I'll talk about the battle pass and monetization later, but there's also the base management side mode where you can do dispatch missions, store access stamina, and convert materials. Again, very typical stuff. All right, now on to everyone's favorite subject. Black Beacon's character rarity is split into four and five stars. Five stars have a base chance of 1% of drop, so slightly below average in my opinion. Four stars at 10.8%. The rest of the 88.2% is the garbage threestar weapons that nobody wants. Hard pity is at 70 pulls. Soft pity starts building up at 40. The feature rate up chance is 70%. One pole costs 150 gacha tokens. Calculating the worst case scenario, I'll use a generous estimate of 60 polls to pity an SSR. Though I have seen people go to hard pity before. Assuming that you lose the 70%, this equates to a total of 18,000 gacha tokens to comfortably guarantee a rateup character of your choice. There is a beginner selector that lets you select any of the five standard SSRs when you pull 30 times and you're actually given the 30 polls very early. So, kudos to that. There is also a 100% rate up banner of the standard five stars and you can select any one of them. Unfortunately, you have to use the limited gotacha tickets for these, not the standard ones. This would have been pretty good if you used the latter. So, I think you should just save your tickets for newly released characters instead. Weapon banners also exist in this game. The base chance for a five-star weapon is 1.5%, fourstar remains at 10.8%. The hard pity is 50 pulse and soft pity starts at 25. Unlike the character banner, the rateup weapon is the only SSR in the pool, meaning the rateup is 100%. If we take a look at the standard weapon banner, it gets even more interesting. Each character in the game has their five-star signature weapon. This is because Black Beacon follows the footsteps of PGR in Hawkeye 3 in the sense that only one or few characters can use a certain weapon. This means Zero's signature weapon cannot be used by anyone else. In this permanent banner, you can freely select the target that you want on raid up. The rules are exactly the same, and the rate of chance is still 100%. This is even better than PGR's permanent weapon banner, which has a rate up chance of 80%. Well, if only the character banner follow PGRs as well. You win some, you lose some, I guess. Similarly to PGR, character banners do not drop weapons and vice versa. This gotcha system is definitely one of the better ones I've seen. It would depend on how much pole income is given out and whether new characters join the standard pool after their initial run for me to really make a judgment of how generous it is, which is not really possible with the launch review. Hopping over to monetization now. For the record, I've actually spent money on this game already. The first time I saw some of the pricing gave me a slight shock. First of all, the Welkin is $5 Canadian, meaning unless this is a mistake and the devs don't know how currencies work, this should translate to $4 USD. Talk about a discount. The battle pass comes with a free and premium track. The premium track costs $10 Canadian, which means it should be around $7 to $8. At level 15, you get a fivestar weapon selector for any of the four stars. And if you have the premium track, any of the standard five stars, too. That's pretty generous. As a low spender, these should be the only purchases worth considering, but you have your usual whale bait in the cash up with the topup packs. Something else I want to take a look at is the premium skins. The gaming industry has pretty much normalized $10 to $20 skins. Yet, if you take a look at the one for Viola, comparing it to the topup deals, assuming that you use the first top up bonus, you can actually buy it for $5. A skin with an alternate artwork and a 3D model for that amount is pretty good. Overall, I'm very satisfied on how it's monetized. They could have gone harder with the pricing or the paid skins or the boosted packs, but it's all fairly tame. In terms of content available at launch, all you have to do is take a look at the events tab. Look at all these entries. That's what I like to see. Granted, some of them are character trials and login rewards, but the impression I get is that despite having just been launched, there is a lot of content for you to do. One of the main perks during launch week is being able to refund all the materials used to upgrade a weapon just so you can experiment and find what works better. There is a separate rogueike mode with its own short campaign, the endgame challenge mode, bosses with adjustable difficulty, and a few others. This is one of the most featurerich games that I've seen at launch. I'll have to wait a bit longer to see how the game is maintained overall, but it's gone to a very good start. Now, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that all is well, because there's still some kinks to iron out during launch week. Most of these relate to login or small technical issues here and there. Sometimes you'll catch the occasional untransated text. Sometimes you couldn't log in, and sometimes the sound was just immediately cut off for some reason. Performance can also be improved. My Red Magic phone can run Withering Waves smoothly at 60 fps on high settings, so there's no reason why performance should dip a game like this. It also tends to drain battery fast. If you blow up the textures on a big screen, some of it may not look too good on the PC version if they don't make certain adjustments to it. So far, my primary wish list for Black Beacon is official PC port. This is an absolute must. They will lose players, or hell, they've already lost players because of this. For an action RPG, not allowing for the precision of a keyboard or controller is just criminal. This needs to be ironed out as soon as possible. Game optimization on launch was also pretty rough overall. It's really a matter of time how fast they can fix or improve on what's already there. Not the worst launch I've seen, but obviously far from the best. I do have a lot of confidence that the game will reach a polished state. However, I do want to point out that the state of the game at launch was riddled with small issues here and there. Aside from that, I'm very impressed by the game. I think the story is solid with good world building. The gameplay is simple but with lots of potential for skill expression. The gotacha and monetization are fair and feel generous, and it's loaded with content at launch. There's something about the overall concept, the distinct feel for its character design, and the way the world and story just blend together that's kept me intrigued for the past 2 weeks. I myself will be playing this game for the time being. Well, unless something else catches my eye, of course. Overall, though, Black Beacon gets my esteemed first impressions rating of play it. I see a very wellexecuted concept laid on top of some slightly cracked foundations. I believe that in due time this game will find its own niched audience to support the development of the team. That's it for the review. So, let me know what you think. Is this one of the most underrated releases this year or is it not worth the hype? As always, thank you for tuning in to the review and have fun out there. [Music]