I played the beta yesterday for almost 2 hours. I didn't try the multiplayer and went straight for the missions since that's what I'd prefer for this game anyway. Aside from the clipping issues on some ledges it was a fun experience. I played as Orendi and tore thru the first handful of mobs with ease but the first mission definitely got progressively harder and more enjoyable. The drone purchases are a nice twist. I'd always buy a combat drone, but in the last half of missions, those drones would get destroyed so easily, they seemed worthless. The genome upgrades were interesting but it'd be nice to have a reset option for it since once you make a selection its set and felt a bit too restrictive. It makes sense to have that kind of system in StarCraft since it gives you some replay value but for a FPS it felt like I was setting up my character to play a specific role and when I realized it wasn't working good for me I had no option to try something new. While in starcraft, whatever options you choose for upgrades are completely viable and not necessarily OP over other choices, except maybe 1 or 2. I did get screwed at the final battle against Isic on the first mission. I could have sworn I had 20 mins left on my server time in the pause menu when I started that fight but by the time I got to the final phase of the fight and he was a floating head, I got a count down timer. I don't know if it was the server time on the beta running out or if it was a "hard enrage timer" for the boss. If it was a hard enrage timer then I have no interest in this game. It was beyond annoying to play thru the entire mission while exploring the environment and taking my time to get to the final boss, see it has about 10 hp left and then 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.. mission failed. And no option to restart the boss fight. I'm going to assume it was my server time expiring. Other than that it was a fun experience.
I tried the second mission with Thorn and I sucked bad with her. lol. After going from Orendi with an endless spam attack to basically a sniper class, it threw me completely off. shes an interesting character, but in mission modes I often felt like I was getting swarmed with enemies faster than I could shoot arrows and had to spam my aoe and melee. Orendi felt much easier to play, but was quite squishy.
Overall it was fun, but I don't think it sold me on the game. It felt like a gearbox game with borderlands style humor and I love that. But if I still have borderlands 1 and 2 to play so I might stick with those for now.
The campaign mission seemed a bit generic in regards to the characters. Since you can play any character in the campaign there were no points where the player character would interact vocally with the events going on so it didn't feel immersive to me. Much like a battlefield campaign, the player character is just some generic mute character. I never like that in a campaign. With this many characters, they could have made a campaign that is locked to a specific character in a "story mode" and each mission could have been tailored to that character to give you insight on their background and their personality. And then after you unlock more characters, you could replay the mission in an "mission" mode like what we got in the beta.
btw, how does Orendi's ultimate work? I swear it never hit anything in the missions. I'd hit the button see her do this great animation with symbols.. and nothing. I thought I was using it wrong, so I literally stood in front of enemies and did it, only to take damage during the animation and not see it do anything.