I have 40 hours in. My feedback so far.

I have fun when I am playing, but that fun always starts to move into frustration after a short while due to questionable developer choices and bugs. I have about 40 hours in at the moment and I have 550 hours in the previous HLL.

One thing that I have noticed is that there seems to be an increasing uptick in griefers and trolls. For some dumbass reason, the developers made kicking people harder. They chose to hide the vote kick to most people by default. So right now, people are acting a fool, teamkilling, destroying their own teams equipment and spawns, with seemingly zero accountability. ONE person can fuck up the game for 100. It is so fucking annoying and I cannot understand why the developers chose this.

Every time I play, someone is forgetting, or unaware, that their mic is OPEN and the noise is distracting and annoying. "Just mute them." Well the problem with that is that the game is built for communication, and every single role is important to communicate with. A lot of times it is the Squad Leader who is the offender. I still end up muting them if it is bad enough, but the game suffers as a result.

There are some bugs that have a major impact on the game. There is a game mechanic where enemy players are marked with red dots on the map when your team fires a recon flare, or the commander uses a recon plane. In the old HLL, they show up for a brief period before disappearing and you respond. Right now, they do not disappear. That means the map is cluttered with red dots from every flare and recon plane used over the whole game. Players and squad leaders are responding to red dots that are old, and their movements are wrong because of it. They are responding to ghosts. It has a major effect on the gameplay of every single game. I think it is a bug, but if it isn't, if it is a developer choice, it is a serious mistake. EITHER WAY, it is the most critical thing in need of fixing at the moment. It should have a hotfix deployed immediately. The fact that it has not been fixed is so frustrating.

Another huge impact bug I have seen is that the boats will fail to become a respawn point, even when players turn it off after positioning it as they are supposed to in order to make it a spawn point. It leads to wasted resources, wasted time, and a huge source of frustration. It also sends a wave of grief through the team because players confuse the driver's action as a mistake to not turn off the boat instead of the bug that it often is.

Bullets do not penetrate things that you would expect them to. Shitty straw gates and tiny openings in houses/huts/cover, do not allow bullets to pass. It is ridiculous and immersion breaking every time. Very frustrating.

Right now the helicopters are in a broken state in my opinion. Pilots are using them to kill players by running them over. A funny idea, a funny mechanic, but seriously stupid as a use of a helicopter in Vietnam. It is not how it would or should be. "It's not real, it's a game." Yeah, I know, but do we want the choppers to be used as transports for players and supplies, or lawn mowers...? You can argue that point if you want, but I don't see a way that it makes any sense to keep that as is. Aside from that, the helicopters are way too tanky. They don't seem to be effected by small arms fire and only get destroyed by specific weapon types. I hope I am wrong on that last point, but that is how it seems.

Pilots are using the choppers to take out enemy spawns and tunnels. Not in the way you might expect, as in, landing, getting out, walking over, and taking it out on foot. They are literally flying into them, bouncing off them as they destroy them, and flying to the next NVA spawn or tunnel. The pilots can hear the enemy radios from the spawns and tunnels from the helicopter. That is absurd. You shouldn't be able to hear shit from the chopper aside from extremely heavy gunfire when close. That is such an odd choice to have made. Right now, using a chopper in this way is so advantageous to the team that it has created an incentive to keep doing so, regardless of how game breaking and immersion breaking it is. And if you are a troll/griefer, you can use the chopper to destroy your own team spawns in the same way, because it will destroy your own garrison when touched.

Enemy nodes are marked for you. Every time I place a node down as an engineer, I KNOW it will be destroyed soon after the game has gone on for just a few minutes. If I want to stop that from happening, I have to build barbed wire around it, which is not always possible due to terrain. That also stops me from deploying barbed wire on the defense points. That sucks. Building a set of nodes takes time. And from a gameplay perspective, it is incredibly boring. But it is so valuable to the team, so it must be done. But there is little incentive to me to keep doing it when I know they will be found easily. They are literally highlighted for the enemy. Wtf is that?

Domination and conquest are absolutely terrible game modes for this game. They should be scrapped/removed.

There are a lot of extremely questionable choices from the developers that make me wonder if they even play their own game.

When the game works, it is very fun. Creeping through the jungle and hearing footsteps and trying to decide if it is friend or foe, turning towards it and seeing no friendlies and trying to kill the enemy and their allies before they kill you, is a constant, and very Vietnam. They nailed this part, and it keeps me engaged. It is very addicting.