One step forward, two steps back. If Isonzo felt most like a Mount and Blade fight, Gallipoli is more akin to a hunting simulator. The combat is slower and more methodical, with longer respawn times, larger travel distances, and massively increased weapon sway and ADS time.
Isonzo devolved into peaking out of cover quickscoping people and strafing-dodging in the middle of rifle duels, which felt more like mid-2000s Halo and CoD than "authentic WW1 combat," but it was fun, and the pace of the game kept the "meatgrinder" vibe you're looking for in a game set in WW1. Gallipoli, in contrast, is a game entirely about slowly moving up to the front line, finding a good piece of cover, pre-aiming, holding the shift key for half a second until the weapon sway stops, and then uncrouching and taking a shot at the first person you see. Rinse and repeat. Mapflow, flanking, movement tech and aim skill are all significantly de-emphasized in this in order to focus the combat experience on what is essentially a skeet shooting game.
The map size also means you're likely to see more mortar shells in a match than enemy players. Suppression is now an extremely oppressive mechanic, but all it really results in is you sitting there, staring at the back of a wall for extended periods of time until the artillery barrage or machine gunner stops. The intent is for it to create an opening for the enemy team to rush in, but there isn't enough comms use in the community to coordinate such a thing, and even if there were, this is still a skeet shooting game. Your allies on the periphery of the assault are just going to snipe anyone who tries to use suppressive fire and artillery barrages as cover.
The whole flow of the game is just sitting in place, slowly moving the frontline forward inch by inch. On paper that sounds like WW1, but it's not tense, there's little action, and by and large it's actually a relatively calm experience. The chaos of the attackers finally breaching a control point and the desperate fight to push them back in Isonzo has been replaced with a slow, methodical snipe-and-sweep through the trenches, hoping you will be able to push them out in time but completely unable to actually make any bold plays that would charge in or flush them out. This game is [i]too[/i] tactically-focused for its setting and for the audience its casual, gamified control-point mode draws. Instead of playing like a bunch of untrained youths being thrown at a wall, the game expects you to play like a spec-ops team. But "meat grinder" and "Ghost Recon" don't mix.
Beyond that, there are some meta-level design choices that really haven't worked out. There's been a massive reduction in the amount of special class slots per team in order to facilitate slower, more methodical gameplay. Which means that whoever loads in first gets the single Sniper and HMG slots every single match. If you do not have the fastest connection and SSD in the lobby, you will never be able to play either of these classes. This has also made utility extremely limited, because the handful of players who get to play with anything more than a rifle and a single grenade mean your squad is gonna be stuck with nothing but a rifle and a single grenade for almost every member.
Levelling has also been overhauled. It's now twice as slow as in Isonzo, which was already a massive grind, but to compensate, there are now weapon levels in addition to player and class levels, all with different XP requirements. This results in the weapon, player, and class levelups all happening at staggered intervals, which makes unlocks more [i]frequent[/i] than in Isonzo, but still results in an experience that feels far more stingy, grindy, and unsatisfying, because now you have exponentially more trees to grind out, and the rewards are all just minor perks. Like a 30% reduction in stun from nearby explosions, or a minor increase to ADS speed in a game that expects you to ADS [i]before[/i] exiting cover. Isonzo might take two hours to hit an unlock, but when you'd hit them you'd get 3 new weapons, 2 new utility tools, and a passive perk all at once. Gallipoli gives you an unlock every hour, but it's always a single perk that isn't even useful most of the time.
