Hello there dear Mercury Steam dudes. I signed up for the PS4 beta a long time ago, mostly because the art direction for this game really piqued my interest. I did not spend any time investigating or researching the game in the mean time, meaning I just jumped into the current PS4 beta build.
Here are some of my impressions.
1. The graphics are properly good. Effects are nice, frame rate held up. Models are quite detailed, the enemies however became very repetitive. The menus had a weird blurring effect on the graphics, which for me made things worse.
2. Sound was good enough for my liking.
3. Cut scenes were really bad for me. The incessant closeup shaky cam was nauseating and ugly. The content of those cut scenes was also pretty bad. I understand that these characters are supposed to be the ultimate badasses, but constant swearing and just bad dialogue got super old, super fast. Would skip all of them.
4. Character selection was a trial and error, since the weaponry differences are not immediately obvious. Nobody told me that the default character dude is a sniper only. I later switched to the pseudo-Russian cyborg man and his gatling gun served me a lot better.
5. Matchmaking menu is a mess. Did I queue up for a match? Did I queue up for three? I had no idea. Backing up from the menu would immediately stop matchmaking - even though this time could be spent customizing characters or checking other menus. Bad design.
6. Matchmaking failed 80% of the time. I don't know whether people simply did not bother to press the Accept button or something else, but it was terrible.
7. When players left the matches, no new players were added in. Making most of the matches impossible to complete due to reduced firepower.
8. Throughout the beta, I could not complete a single mission. The post-mission loot screen was laughably bad and actually detrimental for me to try again.
I think there is a cool little game hidden away in there, but it is too early to even consider playing this again. Everything was a mess, the menus are bad, the character sheets are bad, the different cards are incomprehensible and so on. People will compare this to Battleborn and that might be a very bad thing in the long run.
Please make it better.
