Played for a couple of hours. Some random thoughts
- Map is huge and the travel time to the objective areas is significant. I don't actually view this as a negative, as it helps reinforce the unforgiving design and how much each life matters
- Guns feel good and the TTK is actually longer than you'd expect for this type of game especially if you're wearing armor. There's some increased survivability compared to games like Squad and ARMA which is nice because its easy to get shot from all over the place. This is especially true here due to the abundance of snipers. Right now they're actually pretty overpowered, especially since they can just stand on top of the many towers and snipe people across the entire control zone. There isn't an efficient way to counter them right now outside of just trying to make it to the towers and climb up them to take them out. Maybe as people unlock the littlebird guns and the attack choppers that will change.
- Progression could use some re-balancing. So many things are gated especially early on, you pretty much have access to almost nothing and need to unlock it all. I wanted to focus on being a medic and reviving people, and then I realized you have to grind the medic role just to unlock the defibrillators. The tanks and other damage dealing vehicles have even more strict requirements, you have to level up the driver role to 30+ before you can even buy them in-game. As a result, the vehicles so far have no real presence or impact on the battles which is a bit of a bummer. Its far more infantry oriented at least initially than I was expecting. And since you don't have these offensive vehicles rolling around causing explosions or mayhem the destruction aspect has been non existent. I don't think I saw any blown up buildings or walls in my playtime. Also, returning to the gated equipment for a moment. There was an instance where an armored vehicle from the other team was literally just driving around a group of like 10 of us for a good 5-10 minutes but since nobody had explosives unlocked yet we literally couldn't do anything about it lol it just freely drove around trying to roadkill us. This was actually funnier than annoying ill admit that.
- The money based economy and how it works is actually brilliant. Almost anything you do earns you money and not only is it basically your score but its also how you permanently unlock things and make them available for purchase outside of matches. Things like transporting teammates into the control zone gets you money, but in addition to that if those same teammates get kills you'll actually get assists for that which grants you even more money. This makes for a pretty rewarding gameplay loop and even if you don't want to spend a lot of money on your loadout when spawning in you can make it an effort to loot dead enemies/teammates instead and get good stuff from them. There is a lot of interesting stuff to the economy that I think i've only scratched the surface of.
- In terms of the core objective, I would like to see some tweaks. I feel like the 'hotzone' in particular, which gets your team the most points when controlled, moves a bit too quickly and also through random places that aren't that interesting to fight in. There are a lot of neat landmarks on the map like an entire village area with small houses, a church with a graveyard, the many towers, etc but the hotzone seems to move through random fields and roads more than anything else. I know there is a whole mechanic where you can pull the hotzone to a tower and hold it there which sounds neat on paper, however that isn't explained in the tutorial and I don't think anyone on my teams has figured out how to do that.
- Graphically, its not much to look at. But given the 100 player count and the size of the map as well as (presumably the destruction) it actually runs better than I expected it to. I have my framerate locked at 120 and it never seems to drop below that even in this alpha state. The most demanding graphical presets are clearly missing, so Im curious to see how different the full release will be. Regardless its still a cut above many other UE5 games in terms of optimization.
So yeah its a pretty good game in its current state, but with a few tweaks and changes it could be something great.