ok, so i played for a few hours last night. here are my thoughts;
each round is timed, so it's pretty quick to get a lot of matches done.
the three classes i played (out of five) were all different enough to be interesting. assassin, which is melee, pathfinder which is ranged and pyromancer which is ranged also. i didnt try the shaman (healer) or warden (tank). im not sure how much the tank class helps the team since i didnt play the class, i dont know how much their abilites help mitigate or focus damage away from other players. but man, having a healer on your team can be huge, since you dont regen health. there are healing stations scattered throughout the maps, but they only heal a little bit, and i dont think you can hit one station more than once. at least, it didnt just keep healing me from my experience.
there are 4 maps i played on (i think there are 6 total), but no map/minimap on your ui. pretty much until you learn the maps, you dont know where the hell anything is. the maps are pretty small for the most part though and it didn't take too long to figure them out. not sure if a mini map is even needed really since the maps are so small, just pointing it out that there isnt one.
there are 3 types of match i played. team with least deaths, capture the relic (flag) /tower cap, and straight tower cap. since it is timed, you don't have to worry about teams 'turtling'. i like that the type of match you play is independent of the map you are on.
wall jumping seems to be a big help if you can do it right. its a good way to get to spots to pew pew people if you are a ranged class, or get away from people if you are a melee type class. also, except for one spot on the sewer map that is an insta-kill fall, you do not take fall damage. you do get little blood splatters on the screen, so idk if they plan to add fall damage in at some point, but currently, no health is lost jumping from any height.
leveling up is a bit wonky imo. you get xp, which at each level gets you a bonus of some sort. the most common bonus is a 'point' which allows you to take from one stat (armor, resource[energy/mana], speed) and add to one of the two remaining stats. except you have 4 armor types and there isnt really a clear cut explanation of what increasing or decreasing them does. also, once you spend your points, there is currently no way to refund them. that's a bummer. another leveling note is that you can use the xp you earn on one class to level up any class. because of that fact, i think it is important to point out that when you go into the level up screen, the screen defaults to the assassin. i was playing pyromancer, and then went to the level up screen, hit level up and assigned my point to my armor and then realized i had just modified the assassin i hadnt even played yet. this is a pita and there should be some sort of class select screen first imo. once you know you have to click the class i guess it doesnt matter but i was kind of irritated that modified a class that wasnt the one i just played.
each class has 8 skills to play with and that's it. kinda nice to not have bars and bars of spells to deal with. (also, no gear. although i have seen mention on the forums of adding gear drops at some point.) i'm still having trouble remembering what skill does what and which key to press for which skill, but thats just me and my slow ass learning curve and not really the game.
also, if you are used to games where you hit a key to 'target' a player, and then your spells hit them as long as you are facing them or close to them if you are melee, this game doesnt work that way. you have a small target circle on your screen, and whoever is in the target is who you are hitting with your skill. which is good because there is no need to tab or key press to switch targets. however if you are near a player, but dont have them in your target circle, you are not hitting them with anything. this is especially important if you get in a group of people. focusing one player to burn them down can be tough. i think there are skill enhancements through level up that allow you to focus that skill on a certain player, but i havent made it far enough in one class to see how that works. (see above for my leveling snafu)
i really felt like sometimes i was hitting a button and nothing was happening. could be lag, but it just mostly felt like the game wasn't responding. i didnt notice issues with movement like you normally see with lag.
team play is important. this makes for the same kind of issues on any game where you match up with random people. first and foremost, the game is so new right now that a lot of people don't know the objectives of the maps. (obviously i didn't either until i played a few times) people just join in and start killing. so for a few of the tower cap matches, no one was capping towers. for the most part, chat was pretty civil, but there were a few matches where there were one or two people who just spent the whole match with the 'LOL UR BAD LOL GET OWNED LOL NOOB' kind of bs typing in chat. however, it is nice that between rounds (each match is two rounds) you can opt to switch classes. so if your team doesn't have a healer, or you already have 5 tank types, you can switch it up. you may be able to switch during a round, idk, i didn't try that. you can also try to switch teams (to group with friends, or jump ship on a losing team if that's your bag), but it won't let you switch teams if it makes the teams unbalanced. i can see where it could be frustrating if your team just sucks though.
generally speaking, i think it's a good game for the money, but it definitely is a new game. i think after it has been out for a bit, and they can polish it up a little bit, it will be that much better. for instance, right now, there is a team deathmatch option, but it isnt available yet (greyed out). there were some people saying they had no sound yesterday, but sound the day before. no ability to select a server to join. joining in with a friend can put you on opposite teams. atm, there seems to be only general chat and no way to chat with just your team. just little things like that.
tl;dr version - if you like relatively quick paced pvp, this game is pretty fun. i can see playing it for quite a while before i would get bored with it. however, it is not completely polished imo, so if that kind of newness of a game irks you, you may want to wait. although with the steam sale through the 18th, you buy the game and get a copy to gift. if you go in with a friend, that makes it 10 bucks.
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