I want so hard to like this game. But my god it has issues.
Hit registration. This was a problem in the original entry in this series Verdun, and it seems like things have somehow gone backwards. There's not really anyway to learn being a good shot, because your shot might connect when it absolutely should not, and then other times you can dump a mag at point blank range and get nothing.
This gets compounded by the godawful suppression and panic effects. Most of the game is spent suppressed or panicked in some way due to stray rounds or the constant artillery storms (which incidentally also have the wonkiest hit detection ever, seriously, a shell can impact around a corner from you in a trench and kill you.). Trying to aim is a horrific exercise in frustration. The iron sights are also just downright awful in every regard. If i'm starting to feel sick and developing a headache from trying to, y'know, aim and fire, something has gone horribly wrong.
The "tutorial", if you can call it that is laughable, and this directly affects the teams you will play with. In every game i've played so far, maybe 5 out of a team of 25 understand what rally points are, everyone else has no idea they can even place them or what they do, leading to them frequently either not being placed, or being placed by someone far behind you who doesn't understand why that's a bad thing.
Clipping is also a major issue. The amount of players I have seen abusing positions to become invincible, or to shoot through the ground is insane. Again, this was a problem that had to get fixed back in Verdun, why is it happening again? When one mg gunner can sit pretty clipped into the ground and unkillable except for melee or from a specific angle, usually behind them, it utterly kills matches, and there is currently nothing you can do about it, no report function, no vote kick, nothing.
Map balance is horrifically one sided. There should be some degree of advantage to the defenders of course, that makes perfect sense. However it's so slanted in the defenders favour that I have yet to see a match where attackers even come close to winning. Some of the map starts are laughable in how bad it is for the attackers. There appears to be no spawn protection, and on several maps this means that the defenders can fire straight into the attackers starting spawn zone. It' funny exactly once when the attacking team spawns and before the first attack phase has even started half the team has been mown down by a single machine gunner.
Weapon variety is pretty poor compared to other entries as well. Every single rifle feels the same to use, and that is to say, they all feel sluggish and clunky, with close combat decided largely by latency and random chance more than who actually raised their gun first. Pistols are largely identical besides being separated into magazine fed and revolvers, with magazine fed always being superior due to revolvers for some reason not having round reloading i.e. when you reload, even if you only need to load one bullet, you have to reload the entire magazine, which I hope to god is a bug and not intended behaviour. Melee weapons are largely pointless aside from a few niche situations where having a bayonet is useful. Despite there being at least one pure melee class, there is no reason to take it as melee weapons often require 2 or more hits to kill, which makes no sense for the tradeoff of having no ranged weaponry. You're better off just taking a gun with a bayonet than using a trench club, so why does the class even exist? Only the british have slightly unique weaponry in the form of the lewis and hotchkiss guns. Given that earlier entries in the series had things such as artillery lugers, early machine pistols, trenchguns, large mag rifles, it's just an incredibly disappointing weapon roster to see when we've already had better weapon variety in the older games.
Overall, there's just so many things that feel awkward/clunky, and bugs that just ruin the fun of things.
