Mech combat wise, good foundation. Feels like an interesting twist on AC6, and the controls are nice and responsive. Melee is bigger than there for sure. Melee is for big damage and stagger building, but runs on an ammo system. Builds back up slowly on it's own, goes up faster if you deal damage using ranged, works even better if you can bait the enemy into melee so you can parry to build up their stagger at the same time, which has a nice-ish rhythm to it. Still the idea of directly having it be about weaving between melee and ranged is neat. Parries are a little too easy rn, and ranged deals a little too little damage imo, making it skew a little hard towards melee engagement though. I like the idea of choosing between targeting limbs or going straight for the kill! Assault boost equivalent feels insufficiently faster than normal movement right now considering the heat cost. When blocking, dodging, and melee all build heat, it's hard to justify during combat considering how crippling an overheat is. One thing I like is that AC6 style repair kits exist, but they repair ablative armor only, and do not fix internal damage that happens if something has stripped that ablative armor. Allows for a bit more incentive to pay closer attention to maintenance. Enemies unfortunately also seem tohave armor in a way that feels bad because you can only see their real health and not their armor, meaning you don't see the damage you do for a while, so it feels pretty bad while you're whittling them down.
Do wish we got some mech customization and the allies to play with to crank it up a bit.
Presentation wise, it's still obviously a touch rough, but I absolutely love the decision to go full ace combat with introducing the enemy ace during the demo mission, right down to the touch of Zero style spanish guitar. The bright colors and shading are lovely. Voice acting feels rough and placeholder-y.
Unfortunately my first attempt to play crashed my entire computer due to an error involving the resolution, but spamming alt+enter on startup seems to prevent it.
Real potential here IMO, looking forward to watching it progress!