I’m…not impressed.

The weapons meta feels pretty much the same. I do like the Cybertron Cannon, and the Flapjack Rifle is an interesting middle ground between an AR and an SMG. But everything else feels irrelevant. (Like how is the Drum Shotgun even meaningfully distinct from the still-available Maven? What use even is the Combat SMG? I haven’t regularly carried an SMG since they vaulted the Stinger.)

The Thermal DMR and thermal vision in general is just an annoyance to me. It makes the game look ugly and makes everything except players (at least those who haven’t been recently stung by bees) much harder to see. Couldn’t it have shown an outline effect similar to the Flare Gun or Recon Gun instead?

And…I don’t like the new jungle areas. Even playing with builds it’s annoying to try to get around, because of all the cliffs everywhere, and getting ambushed by players with high ground is an almost guaranteed loss. It’s as bad as the floating buildings on indestructible platforms with few ingress points from a few seasons back. I can’t imagine trying to deal with this area in zero build. Especially without one single mobility item like the ODM or Spider-Man Glove or Grapple Glove, or even the Shockwave Hammer or Kinetic Blade.

On top of it all, since they added separate ranked and unranked queues, why does it feel like my very casual group keeps ending up in matches full of sweats in unranked? We must be getting mercilessly crushed by better than 50% of the opponent teams we run into. Expecting to run into very competent and well-armed teams near the end of a match is one thing, where we know it’s time to stay close together and coordinate, but now we’re struggling to make it past the first couple of storm phases and survive long enough to find a basic loadout. We’d at least try ranked to see what the difference might be, but we’re usually a group of 3 and there’s no ranked trios, so…

Even the season pass feels like a flop. Who wants to play as a non-transforming miniaturized Optimus Prime? Why not at least put a few other Autobots in the pass, so you can put together a themed squad?

After all the recent bugs and especially the unexplained removal of trios, I am running very low on goodwill. I was really hoping it would be an amazing season that changes up the meta in a big way and wins me back. But instead I just feel like I need to take a break.