Firstly, this game is amazing and I can't wait to play more of it. You have truly captured the magic of older online shooters like BF3 and Titanfall and managed to maintain a modern look and feel. This is the shooter I have been looking for and didn't even know it.
Movement Posititves:
- Movement in general feels great. Sometimes it's a little jarring to not have sprint, but I believe that will be fine once I get more used to depending on the grappling hook for more regular movement.
- LOVE the air dash! Easily one of my favorite features in shooters. I fell in love with this style of movement from the Armored Core games. It was one of the things I felt Halo 5 did well. The Titans in Titanfall also had a dash mechanic and it feels amazing to side dash an opponent's attack and then wreck them. Great job here.
Movement Criticism:
- Some kind of cooldown indicator for your dash refresh would be VERY helpful with the frantic combat. I believe Hawken had something like this. Maybe the option to have the dash refresh bar show up near the reticule would be nice.
- I struggled to find a good use for the PV in general. Obviously it's good for crossing open expanses, but one of the perks induced shield recharge when you use it and I rarely found good opportunities in combat to use the vehicle. It takes so long to deploy that it isn't great in split second getaways. If this is too easy to use I could see how it could quickly become annoying as everyone will just run away. I only had 3 hours with it so maybe with some more experience this will be fine.
Gunplay Positives:
- I used the pathfinder class the entire time because I was having a ton of fun with them and was hoping to unlock some of the later weapons/gadgets to try. I did unlock the burst rifle and forgot to use it, but the Avenger AR feels great. It feels like a very all around weapon exactly as it's advertised. Not amazing at range, but still dangerous in the right hands and it does very well in close to mid range. Was really enjoying my time with it.
- The ultimates have a very well balanced charge rate in my opinion. I felt like the airstrike was very useful at the right moments, but was also easy to misuse requiring good game sense to get excellent value out of it. Also I did not feel I was dying excessively to airstrikes or other ultimates.
Gunplay Criticism:
- The homing mine launching weapon that I think the Titans get feels extremely oppressive. Considering it is a homing weapon (and therefore a lower skill requirement) the mines should not home well in my opinion. Please tune these down. They should be good situationally, but I have footage of the mines diving over a cliff edge after me. It seems way too good.
- The starting pathfinder shotgun reticle does not seem even remotely representative of it's spread cone. This may have been done intentionally, but it feels kind of cheap or unpolished. I would suggest at least making it match the base spread even if it doesn't have any kind of bloom. It will look a bit nicer and really shouldn't effect target acquisition.
Class Balance Criticisms:
- In general the classes seemed to fit very well into their rolls. Titans were harder to kill and tech ops would occasionally be around with their healing ray (pretty rare actually). The only class that was extremely frustrating to play against was the Wraith. The stealth ability (which I didn't realize they had for the longest) was allowing them to constantly just appear behind me and wreck me. I did not play the wraith so I don't know what kind of balance mechanics were used, but I think they need to emit a loud sound when coming out of cloak similar to Sombra from Overwatch. If they don't have a delay on their offensive capabilities after coming out of cloak then that should be added as well. The cloak should be more useful for positioning and escape rather than assassinating everything.
Team Balance:
- Please implement some kind of team balancer between rounds (NOT REFERRING TO MMR just shuffle teams according to performance). There were several matches where my team would just get spawn trapped and there seemed like now way to get out of it.
Map Design:
- On some of the maps there is maybe one control point that is far away from the rest. These usually serve to get your team spawn trapped if they take them. I would consider moving these points closer to the action. They feel out of place in such a fast paced game.
All in all I have not been more addicted to a shooter game than I am to this one in a very long time. You guys have something very special here and I look forward to seeing it grow!
You can check out my footage at twitch.tv/Malafis_Gaming