Developed by Digital Arts, Heavy Metal Babes is Nutaku’s free-to-play lewd Gacha game, also released on Steam.

Heavy Metal Babes is ready to offer you addictingly entertaining turn-based Mecha battles spiced up with delicious rewards of hentai to chase after. Build your own team of Xen fighters and battle your way to victory by strengthening your team through upgrades and new abilities!

Table of content:

• Gameplay
• Upgrading Xen fighters
• Xen fighter designs
• In-game microtransactions
• Energy point system
• Predatory tactics
• Gacha duplicates
• Player vs. player
• Hentai
• Conclusion
  
  

Heavy Metal Babes Gameplay

Heavy Metal Babes is an Arena battle turn-based RPG strategy game that offers Mecha combat starring sexy anime girls with hentai on the side to keep things interesting.

The turn-based battle system in Heavy Metal Babes is quite simplistic but very addictive. You can build your own team of Xen fighters, each with their own unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Xen fighters are female mecha pilots that can be crafted and unlocked throughout the game.

There are currently 26 Xen fighters available. Exploring different combinations of Xen fighters in a team can be quite an interesting and rewarding feeling, as long as you have the Xen fighters unlocked that is…

The more you level up your Xen fighters through battling, the stronger they become. You can only level up a certain amount of Xen fighters at a time when doing battles depending on the chapter you are in, the rest will naturally fall behind as you battle more and more without using them.

When my first mecha pilot got destroyed in battle, I had not played Heavy Metal Babes even half an hour. At that moment, I realized this game is not messing around. Heavy Metal Babes is not one of those games that grant you victories for free while giving you the illusion like you are in control just to make you feel good.

If you do not plan out carefully and take care of your pilots during the battle, they can be blown to smithereens with just one enemy turn.

Enemies come in three waves in each battle but your Xen fighters’ health does not replenish after each new wave. You are put against enemies that surpass your numbers, but it is your strategy and clever use of abilities that will bring you on top of a desperate situation.

Early on at level three, you unlock the auto-battle option which will make the repetitive battles less tedious to grind through. The auto-battle A.I is smart enough to win battles for you as long as your enemies are not too much above your league.

A game that plays itself might sound like lazy design but watching the mechs duke it out in a ring without having to use brain power can be surprisingly exciting and entertaining at times.

Each Xen fighter has a special ability and a role on the battlefield. By mixing and matching, you can build a powerhouse of a team to dominate the battlefield, or if not paying attention, you may put yourself at disadvantage against many enemies who work better as a team.

While your level and equipment play a vital role in your overall strength, there is no arguing that a great team combination can win against all odds even when the opponent may be higher level than you.

Upgrading Xen Fighters

Coins are used to upgrade your mechas’ stats, but in order to do so, you first need items called Nanochips that can be earned through battles.

These Nanochips can be placed on a mecha of your choice, and once done so, you can begin to upgrade the chips to increase the base stats they provide by spending coins.

Coins come plentiful through battles and it is the only currency in the game that actually feels balanced in a way that farming them does not feel like a chore, at least not as much as everything else in the game…

Xen Fighter Designs

What makes Heavy Metal Babes a thrilling experience is unlocking new Xen fighters and discovering their unique abilities.

Each Xen fighter feels quite different from one another. Despite the simplistic graphics, the mechas stand out strong and breathe life into the game. You are not only chasing after the sexy girls but also mechas as these are what you will spend most of your time staring at while battling.

Having said that, it is a shame there is no customization for the girls nor the mechas. It would have given the game a whole new level of entertainment to chase after.

A few new sexy outfits for the girls and different paint jobs for the mechas would have gone a long way. Just look at Action Taimanin and what the developers are doing with their sexy girls…

In-game Microtransactions

Heavy Metal Babes does not force you to buy anything if you just want to walk the path of grind. But as is the nature of many Gacha games, Heavy Metal Babes will do just about anything and everything to limit your time playing it unless you are willing to pay with real money.

You can enjoy playing the game just fine if you are okay to limit your playtime to half an hour per day. The problem arises once the player seeks to push over that half-hour daily limit. That is when the game flips a table and stops you right on your track and starts pushing its time-savers on you.

There is a multitude of different in-game currencies; coins, gems, energy, stamina, tickets, cubes, super cubes, and keys. All of these play a different role in buying/unlocking stuff. Whether it is to unlock new Xen girls or upgrading mechas, or simply entering a battle, it is not as complicated as it may sound but sure as hell unnecessary.

Many of these currencies exist only to create artificially crafted obstacles for players to have an enticement to pull out their wallet and pay to bypass something that should not exist in the first place.

While spending real money is not required to enjoy Heavy Metal Babes, the game knows what rope to pull in order to give you a reason to open your wallet for the first time at some point, and from that point on, the trap has already been laid and stepped on.

Almost everything inside the in-game shop seemed overpriced compared to the item’s true value. These prices were designed only for people with lots of money to burn and it truly shows…

Even if you ended up burning some money on Heavy Metal Babes, it barely gives you anything in return other than more reason to grind. Only through limited offers can you hope to get anything that does not feel like a total rip-off.

Energy Point System

You gain energy currency with time simply by waiting and the energy is used to enter battles where you actually play the game and earn rewards and experience.

A single battle costs four energy points which does not sound much at first until you realize that the timer that grants you energy over time only pushes further the more points you gain.

Win or lose, you still gain rewards and experience, so being defeated in battle does not feel so punishing for having used the precious energy points. However, winning does not grant you more energy, so it is all about the waiting game when you finally run out.

You can buy more energy with real money, and that is exactly what the developers want. This is absolutely disgusting practice which should not exist but is very common in many Gacha games.

Predatory Tactics

Required items to upgrade Mechas are scattered across different deals, forcing you to buy twice rather than once in order to get what you need. The upgrades are done by using different colored crystals but these crystals are always sold separately at a maximum price.

Your Xen units seem to always need multiple different colored crystals to be upgraded, so you are forced to spend way more money than originally intended just to get one upgrade.

As you buy a crystal pack for a single upgrade, you most likely are left with excess crystals waiting to be used later for another upgrade. Because of this, one might argue that there is nothing wrong with this system, but the root of the problem lies elsewhere…

It is not about whether you get to keep what you purchased to be used later for something else, but rather that the game does not give you any other option. You are a slave to its predatory design, the crystals are but one example of this.

Gacha Duplicates

When unlocking Xen pilots to add to your collection of sexy waifus by using the “creation” section, you basically open up a lootbox that will throw you a random character.

In many cases, the character you receive is something you may already have, but in Heavy Metal Babes the same character does not necessarily mean you do not want it…

Every Xen figther has some kind of elemental status they carry which can provide strength or weakness against certain types of enemies. These elemental statuses are not exclusive to specific Xen fighter, instead, duplicates can offer different elements by random when first summoned.

Another great use for duplicates is sacrificing them to level up your other Xen fighters that you like to focus on. It is also a great way to quickly level up low level Xen fighters so you do not have to go through so many battles before they reach the same level as your main team.

Overall, duplicates have always been a nuisance in Gacha games and nobody really likes them at the end of the day, but it is nice to see that Heavy Metal Babes knows how to put them to good use and make them feel not so useless.

Player Vs. Player

In Heavy Metal Babes you can play against other players and see whose Waifu team of Mecha pilots are the strongest.

Your Xen fighters’ level does not guarantee a victory against a lower level opponent but it definitely gives you a clear advantage so avoiding high level players is in your best interest.

PVP costs tickets similar to energy points, meaning you can not battle against players for free. You will eventually run out of PVP tickets and have to wait or buy more from the in-game shop using real money.

PVP tickets take a lot longer to gain by waiting than than energy points, we are talking about hours. Once you run out of them, they are a luxury only people with bottomless wallets can afford to constantly throw money at.

This is yet another artificially crafted obstacle to limit players from playing Heavy Metal Babes and and at this point it is painfully clear that the developers did not make Heavy Metal Babes for players to have fun with but only to squeeze them of every penny they got without offering real value in return.

Unlike one would imagine from the name “PVP”, you do not really battle against real players, but rather their Xen fighters that they have trained and built. You are still battling against A.I, but the difficulty is constructed by real players.

To explain this more simpler, imagine having a Pokemon battle where the trainers who are real players simply throw all of their six Pokemons on the arena and leave you to battle their Pokemons without their own presence.

Does it feel underwhelming because you are not fighting a real human? No, it is actually quite okay. The fun factor here is to defeat other players’ Mecha team, not the actual player.

Of course, personally, I would rather play against real opponents, but I can not deny that the way the PVP is built here is not half bad.

PVP will earn you rewards and experience just like when playing outside the PVP Arena, but in addition to that, victories grant you special currency that can be spent in Arena shop to buy Xen pilot fragments.

With this currency you can work towards unlocking a specific Xen fighter which is actually quite a great motivator to play PVP, but then again, it is an absolute grind to unlock even a single fragment.

Depending on the Xen fighter, you may require anywhere between 30-40 fragments to unlock a fighter and the price of one fragment goes around 36-196 victory points. You would need to win 2,586 matches to unlock a character that requires 40 fragments and costs 194 victory points per fragment (You gain 3 victory points per victory).

For the lowest option available, you would need to win 360 matches. While this is a grind indeed, it would not feel such an impossible task if only there was no PVP tickets limiting the player for how many matches they can play per day.

Overall, working towards unlocking these characters through PVP is not worth the effort, not by a long shot. By the time you would be able to unlock your first Xen fighter through the arena shop, mankind would already have figured out deep space travel technology.

Heavy Metal Babes Hentai

Let’s not lie to ourselves, the real reason we even give Heavy Metal Babes the time of day is to see some skin…

There are 26 girls currently in the game and each girl has three to five hentai scenes from which some are animated and some are static images.

There are plenty of hentai to go around but getting to it is not only behind a great wall of grind, it is also realistically speaking impossible for an ordinary player to unlock all the hentai in the game without using horrendous amount of real money.

Due to the heavy Gacha nature of Heavy Metal Babes, nothing is given to the player without a fight. Unless you are willing to empty your wallet, be ready to grind your ass off day-in day-out for that single hentai scene that you are after.

Even something as simple as unlocking hentai scenes when you have the resources for it is put behind a paywall.

You have stamina currency which is required on top of the necessary resources to unlock hentai scenes and guess what happens if you do not have any… Yep, it is back to waiting for hours before you gain more stamina to continue to flirt with the girls.

If you do not like waiting, you can always buy stamina with real money, needless to say, this has to be a new low for Gacha games.

Thanks to the beautiful character designs, It was easy for me to find great-looking Waifus to chase after. However, after having played no more than half a day or so, I began to realize that unlocking the hentai scenes was a task best left for someone with no life.

One must ask themselves what is the point in going through the outrageous grind when it is designed to work against the player in every possible way, and when it is so effortlessly easy to just open up a browser and go search for Heavy Metal Babes Hentai for free.

The developers are not rewarding you for playing their game but punishing by limiting your playtime and asking you to pay real money if you wish to continue.

You are better off paying for an overpriced monthly subscription to some adult site to watch countless hours of high-quality adult entertainment than paying for playtime in order to continue the grind to unlock a single hentai scene.

Heavy Metal Babes’ hentai is decent and times even great but not worth the effort the game puts you through to unlock them.

Most of the lewd images are typical vanilla stuff not enough to raise excitement for anyone who is looking for something more perverted. However, if you enjoy vanilla, then Heavy Metal Babes is right in your alley.

It is just a shame that in order to unlock the hentai one must go to hell and back or pay the ultimate price to see a little bit of skin…

Conclusion

If only there was no limit to how much you can play Heavy Metal Babes, even if it is grindy as hell, I would still dare to recommend it. The Mecha battles surprisingly enough are quite an entertaining way to kill time and can be addicting enough to give reason to return time and time again.

Unfortunately, Heavy Metal Babes is not designed to be fun due to its grossly monetized play point system for every action and upgrade. Never before have I witnessed such abusive overuse of microtransactions in a genre that is well known for its predatory monetization tactics.

You cannot play without energy points, you cannot PVP without tickets, and you cannot unlock hentai scenes without Stamina. Heavy Metal Babes makes every other Gacha game look like a saint with its ridiculous monetization system.

If you value your time and money, I recommend you to stay as far away as possible from Heavy Metal babes. This is a poor excuse for a video game and an even poorer excuse for hentai.

For better Gacha game experiences, check out Action Taimanin.