Played 3 games of Invasion, 2 games of Invasion Slayer. I wouldn't say it's
complete garbage, but it's pretty close. The idea is sound, but it's unbalanced and broken for a number of reasons right now; many of them seem to have already been addressed or certainly will be before release. However that doesn't help me enjoy the game now, and quite frankly I'm pretty disappointed. I would have thought the new backend stuff (like bnet connectivity, Party/lobby system and filters, etc.) would be way more broken and buggy than the main gameplay itself.
My personal problems with Invasion:
-Spawns seem to be broken and inconsistent; it will take me eons to spawn in the back of my base, or my teammate will be nowhere near combat and take forever to spawn. Alternatively I've had multiple people (on the enemy team) spawn literally right in my face, and not as a result of a fireteam spawn or anything.
-Heavily favors Spartans right now. Elites get no ranged starting weapons, but more importantly later on Spartans get access to Grenade Launchers, which make it ridiculously easy to effectively nerf vehicles. All it seems to take is Spartans getting a good Warthog or Scorpion up, and assuming they don't completely suck they can prevent you from getting a weapon drop, which is your best chance to actually get something to stop them with. And one time a Spartan stole our Banshee, and just completely
destroyed our team with it, absolutely nothing we could do against it.
-Map is ridiculously large for 6v6. This is less of a problem in regular Invasion, but in Invasion Slayer it makes the first phase goddamn ridiculous. Later phases are not much better, even with ranged weapons I was literally spending 30 seconds trying to spot anyone from anywhere. Regular Invasion's objectives essentially funnel combat which helps alleviate this, but the map is still way too big for 6v6, and it's borderline terrible in Slayer since there's no single focus.
-The team splitting is ridiculous. We played 3 games with a guy and his guest.
Not only did he and his guest not get put on the same fireteam, all 3 games they were on completely opposite sides. Seriously, how do you fuck this up that bad? We had a few randoms in each game, and they were really confused and didn't understand why they had gotten split up.
-The in-game scoreboard could be split up better with headers or something to indicate sides. Could also be put maybe side-by-side, having to scroll down to see your kills if you're on the bottom third or so of the scoreboard teams seems ridiculous.
It's basically unbalanced, the map is too big for the player count, and honestly it's just not a lot of fun right now. If I've got a group on but they're one or two short of 12 players I'll probably be willing to hop on, but other than that I think I'm pretty much done here. Generator Defense has no appeal to me with being only 3v3, and given how they fucked up party splitting and game balance in Invasion, I don't even know that I'd trust they'd get that right. I'm sure when the final game comes out this stuff will all be addressed or mostly addressed, but right now I'm super bummed out and disappointed. I think playing it a lot more (like I have been) is only going to make it worse, so I'm going to stop now while I still have some excitement left for the final product and not let problems that will likely only exist in this Beta get me down. Sorry urk