I beta tested it and it was pretty fun; lag and likely cheating of sorts made any pvp interaction, as pretty much all pvp games, these days not very fun but the pve part was great. If you like the anime it's worth giving a try.

Nobody really bought it for full price. PvP was mostly nonexistent, depending on region, and most players I met were chill. But the grind is real, like really real and the game itself wasn't that well optimized.

It can be fun and I enjoyed it for a while, but it's just one big map and grind, grind, grind.

Do i recommend it at full price? No way. Do i recommend it to have at a very nice sale? Just past the limit, yes.

There is a story and there is lore beyond the game, but it requires more patience than any random player has. Crafting also isn't instant. Online, you could spend currency to speed it up. Not sure if that will change offline. For me it seemed the online model had you working at a loss. Basically, without the best mechs and guns, you weren't gaining enough to see the worth of a run and it felt like that p2w model where only those who keep throwing money at it advance meaningfully. Or you just grind, grind, grind.

Eventually i got dunno, tired of it and kept dying dumb deaths like falling into water or getting one shot by high rank enemies i didn't notice (or spawned behind me because someone else had killed them earlier) and i gave up because the materials I needed to keep upgrading the base kept becoming rarer and rarer. Then when I finally got a very rare drop and i was in an expensive mech, I just died randomly and that was it.

Also, there's a fan service bathing scene for your android companion, which can show up as a quest. (Keep 'em clean, you dirty, dirty pervert!)

No, it's unrelated.