Ended up having a pretty dismal time with this, unfortunately. Trying to pair up with a friend was a nightmare and there were rampant issues that prevented me from joining parties with actual people. Even when forming a party of my own and looking for players or trying to join a premade party, the game started tossing me into the same party with the same AI characters over and over again, no matter how many times I reloaded or tried to switch servers, and no matter how many times I beat said mission.
The lack of an ability that I could see to leave a party, go to the title screen or otherwise quit the game without closing it is pretty unacceptable, even for a test. That's basic functionality. Moving you on automatically to more missions and erasing all of your progress when you beat them is also taking a lot of fun out of it, I see zero reason for there not to be a persistent example of your character.
They made a lot of decent improvements to the combat, such as the addition of curative magic and offensive magic tied to MP rather than to grenades, but this is sort of undermined by what the game devolved into when I actually did manage to group with players for a mission. Essentially, you just mob a bunch of damage-sponge enemies until an enemy with a great deal of health appears. There aren't really a lot of interesting tactical options here, it's basically just swarm, hit, and run and then repeat. The new weapons have excellent style in a lot of cases, but Comrades suffers from a lot of the combat shortcomings XV itself has that prevent melee combat from feeling as good as the painstaking animations. While magic was a big improvement, its effects surprisingly felt pretty limp.
It has potential for sure, and I probably had more fun with the combat in Comrades than in XV's base game thanks to a lot of excellent and mindful changes (tying magic to MP this way should be a no-brainer, as well as removing friendly fire and long windups) but the server issues, the questionable decision to wipe all beta progress and some of the lackluster elements from XV's base game kept it from being a positive experience overall. They've got a lot of time to make improvements, but I'm not as worried about the technical side of things as I am about the quests providing meaningful and interesting gameplay.
