Played a 6 hour session with 2 friends, my thoughts

Before I get into critiques, I just wanna say the game is SUPER fun. The roguelike elements add a nice flavor and repeatability to campaign progression. I like the variety of missions on familiar maps. Gun play feels pretty good. Looking forward to seeing the full release and I already count early access money well spent. With that out of the way, here’s some critiques we had:

- Cover, as often as not, feels like it’s working against us a lot of the time. One of the most common problems is that peeking over cover felt like creating a one-way angle for the enemy because your gun wouldn’t clear the top of the cover. So I’m getting shot but my bullets are going into a desk or sandbag instead. Even though my reticle is on target. It gets exponentially worse when shooting the cover causes debris to fill my screen so I can’t even see what I’m shooting at anymore.

- The other issue with cover is that when you crowd it your character points the gun to the ceiling. Which can happen at some really jarring times and be frustrating when certain enemies are running at you.

- Leaning in the game feels, to a person with Rainbow Six experience dating back to Black Arrow, really bad. The lean is too severe; rather than clearing a slight angle around a corner it moves your perspective all the way back into cover. The animation of the model also shows how extreme the lean is, to the point of looking goofy. Reducing it by about half would be much more functional and much less frustrating to use. Especially as I still can’t fight the urge to lean constantly lol. It also makes it so that it’s kind of tricky to heal allies while they’re in the middle of leaning.

- During gun fights a lot of attempts at shooting narrow angles and pixels, on the attempts that don’t hit my cover, feels like hits aren’t registering. Normally I’m trying to shoot the shoulder of an enemy using a red dot and I end up just having to swing the angle instead.

- A compass rose for the planning map would be pretty helpful. I may have gotten confused but a couple times we planned pathing based on cardinal directions and the in-game compass showed objectives in the wrong direction.

- The visual layering for upper levels of the oil rig map was really hard to parse out visually. In general the visual clarity for paths, stairs, and doors is a bit confusing. It could very well be a lack of experience on our end, but we’d get into maps and find things confusingly laid out.

- A female character would be nice; one of our group is a woman and would have preferred to not have to play a male operator. In general character customization would be nice such as hair, beards, etc.

- We had a recurring issue where one person in the party (not me, as I was host) would get disconnected. We figured out that one person always disconnected on the hostage map; which we fixed by avoiding it. Until my other friend disconnected on the raid map for the Zulu phase. We haven’t been able to test with a different host or using the high performance launch, but it cost us a couple wins loading into a 3 man run with only 2 people.

Again, really looking forward to a full release.