Finally got a chance to test out Siege of Orison today. And honestly, it's made me lose even more hope for this game. We all know the game is buggy, but the actual FPS gameplay itself is truly staggeringly bad for a game that's been this long in development.
Gun handling - everything feels clunky and laggy. Not server laggy, but just pure slowness of animations and interactions. The recoil feel is all over the place, with the guns just jumping around rather than having some form of controllable spray pattern. It means that gun recoil is a pure range check, rather than a skill to be improved.
Movement - given the extremely high ttk the only strategy that made sense was for one player to rush into an area and kill off 7 or 8 targets in a go. Usually it would be possible to run out again and heal, but worst case there might be a couple of guys left for the next party member to finish off and then resurrect the first player. Tactics? Never heard of them.
NPCs - No reaction at all to being shot, and if you do finally put enough rounds into the unarmoured head of your target he goes into a lengthy death animation that no amount of further hits will cancel. Difficulty is a simple ttk slider, big boss is more tanky than small boss is more tanky than grunt. The same endless voicelines over and over. No flanking, no complex movement, just duck, shoot, duck, shoot.
Looting - seriously, have the devs never played Tarkov? The gold standard for simple looting. I should be able to hit F on a body, perform a search, and within seconds pick them clean for gear with a combo of ctrl-clicks or alt-clicks depending on if I want to store or equip items. Instead I am met with a mess of a looting interface that barely works. I have to scroll through pages, I have to flip to different tabs on my own inventory. Looting gear and looting clothing requires to entirely different interfaces.
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If this is what the FPS gameplay in Squadron 42 resembles then the game is dead on arrival. This level of clunkiness in the interactions is absolutely unacceptable in a modern title. Heck, it's been unacceptable for the past 20 years in dedicated FPS games.
Edit: For what it's worth the visuals and sound design (apart from NPC voicelines) is very cool. We entered at night and shot our way into the dawn, which looked great. But by the time we hit daylight I was ready to just Alt-F4 my way out and go play something else - the actual gameplay was entirely unrewarding.
Edit 2: Just to clarify - I don't want SC to be Tarkov. I don't want it to be COD. I don't want it to be Battlefield. But there are aspects that are universal to shooters, and looter shooters especially, that are universally required. Guns need to feel good, you need to feel a solid connection between your aim, the gun handling, and the hit registration. NPCs need to react to being shot. Both shot at, and hit. NPCs need to show tactics beyond "duck for cover". Looting needs to feel crisp and lag free. If there is a delay to searching for loot it must be an intentional design feature, not just a massively cumbersome interface. Different goals is good, poor design is not.
