Sadly, I can't refund it no more so it's gonna collect dust in my PC.

The game is fun but man, I really had high hopes for this game and it's just bad. The character designs feel very bland and don't get me started with the weapon skins.... THERE IS'T ANY! Just awful colors to use on the characters weapons.

I'll give it another go when it becomes free just to see if people play it.

TLDR: Game is a ton of fun but I can't recommend someone spend $40 on it at this moment. If the game is made free to play, or goes on a decent sale, I would recommend.

Elephant in the room, player count. People will cope and say queues are still fast but that is only because there is 0 SBMM and no region locking WITH crossplay default enabled. Even still the no respawn mode (Rivalry) has long queues at all times, sometimes nobody queuing it at all. Speaking of Rivalry, players throwing to quickly farm XP has been an issue since launch weekend and devs have done nothing to fix it, they've been silent post launch. This makes the mode only playable with a full stack, which will lead to you 4-0'ing every match, at least in my experience. Suffice it to say the playercount is a massive issue. While the numbers are for sure better on playstation, I have serious doubts that they would even be called good, I suspect there is sub 500 players online at any given time as of 2 weeks post launch.

This leaves the other 2 respawn queues, TDM/Kill Confirmed and Domination/Hardpoint. These are both fun and I enjoy both, but there are issues with these modes. TDM matches are always far too short, the kill count should be increased from 30 to 50. Kill Confirmed is actually great, I don't have a suggested change for it. Domination and Hardpoint are both balanced around constant contesting. 2 good teams will lead to long matches where both teams struggle to garner a significant lead. A missmatched lobby will lead to quick games with score gaps of 100+. When these games go the distance they are great fun. Unfortunately due to the lack of SBMM, no doubt further impacted by the low player count, these long high quality matches are not the norm.

The core gameplay here is fantastic. Destiny PVP but way better. People compare this to Overwatch a lot but it plays nothing like that. Healing for example is very slow, so fights can end very quickly despite the generally long TTK if you don't play with your team or stand in the open. There are so many small details here that are very clever and do a lot to make basic hero shooter mechanics more engaging. A quick example is how this game does ability recharging. Every ability is unique in this regard. Some are on a timer like normal, others require kills, others pickups, and others character specific things like getting a scan with a different ability and interacting with that again. There are tons of small twists like this on the standard multiplayer hero shooter formula and almost all of them are great changes. The best way to engage with these systems is in the Rivalry mode, especially the crew bonus system that rewards swapping characters, but unfortunately Rivalry is kind of ruined by previously mentioned issues.

People really don't like the character designs. I'm probably 50/50 like/hate on the roster. I really like some of the character designs like Kyps and Jabali, but then there are huge stinkers like Daw and Bazz (although when you unlock different glasses for Bazz she is way better IMO). There is 0 sex appeal here, which I think is what has most people upset even though they would never admit it. Whether or not this matters a ton is is up to you. For me this is not a major issue, I play these kind of games for the gameplay and if it looked like Roblox with fancy lighting and effects I wouldn't really care. Aside from character models the game looks very good IMO.

Tech wise I've only had some infrequent crashing and small bugs. I am on a 4070ti Super with an AMD 7800x3D though so I can't really comment on performance. Runs good for me, might not on a worse setup.

Im a Sci Fi guy, big on Star Wars pre Disney and I love Mass Effect. This games lore/world has a lot to like. You can read about an astonishing amount of things in the "Galactic Guide", essentially this games prettier version of the mass effect codex. Unfortunately there is no voice acting here so it is a lot of reading. Some sneak peeks here: The entire galaxy is slowly being consumed by something called the tempest, the pseudo galaxy government known as the guild is consuming the finite resources without having a plan for when they run out, and most of the food people eat are giant squid like creatures from another planet doused in grounded up egg goo that makes it taste good. People dismiss this mode, but I think its a great addition and its clear that a lot of effort has been put into this. Were this game to have a long lifespan (which I seriously doubt at this point) there would be so many cool ways for the story to go. You can also read this while you are in queue which is very nice.

There are also the weekly "vignettes" but both featured so far were also in the beta so this has been extremely underwhelming as of now.

With the $40 price tag some promises were made and there was also some automatic expectations. I have been overall disappointed with the value for my money when it comes to this. One thing that was promised thanks to the price tag was no paid battle pass, which is true come launch. Progression in this game is based on your account level and individual character level. Both account and character levels earn you separate rewards. Unfortunately a lot of the rewards you will be earning here are underwhelming. Trinkets seen as battle pass filler in other games still make their appearance here despite the lack of battlepass. Here they serve as progression filler so they can tell you there is a reward in the next few levels when all it ends up being is a weapon charm you probably won't even bother to equip. There are also a TON of re-colours.

Furthermore a lot of the "big" rewards you will eventually earn like legendary skins kind of suck. Like the character designs, legendary skins are probably 50/50 good/bad. Emari's is great and fixes a character who I don't like the regular look of. Meanwhile Jabali's biggest change is some horns on his hat. Despite some of these underwhelming rewards levelling also takes a SIGNIFICANT amount of time. With 60 hours in the game as of writing (5 or so being afk or accidentally left on) I still do not have a single character at level 20, and multiple still not at level 10. My account level is only just 50, with the hardest achievement in the game being to reach account level 100. I have only seen one of these legendary skins in the wild during a match. Progression could be 2x as fast and I would still probably think its a bit slow, but that would be a great improvement.

There is a cosmetic shop coming with the season 1 patch scheduled for October (although we will see how this schedule holds given the games launch), and I will be very upset if a bunch of way cooler skins are added with it and nothing else is added to the games current progression.

I don't regret buying the game, I expected to only get 2 months or so out of it as casual shooter game I could play on the side, but I didn't think the numbers would be THIS bad. I can't recommend a purchase in its current state unless devs come out with some sort of action plan. If it ever does go free or on a deep sale I highly recommend, because the actual game that is here is very good.