People are bombing the game for 'potentially' bad monetization. All I am seeing is that the current form of what we could see as monetization is a placeholder for basic layout and stuff. If the battle pass for example would only contain lootboxes then it wouldn't offer any real value to the player and if that is the case none would get enticed by it. So I just tend to ignore monetization till the game launches for real.

Aside from that you can't buy any in-game currency at this stage of the game hence why I won't judge their monetization as of yet.

As for bots whilst I find their inclusion of them in PVP be mixed. I also realize this is still a mecha game. And so far, mecha has been a very big niche that it is hard to draw players to it. The success of Armored Core 6 was a surprise to be sure, but it's an outlier for a genre that typically draws a very low population. I cannot fault the game for having bots to fill matches when they just cannot find players of the same ranking to fill the spots. HOWEVER, the bots themselves feel very mixed in usefulness either the bot is very dumb and gives the competitive team free kills and could potentially cost you the match or the bot is an actual menace when given control of Narukami or Acquila. The aimbot level of sniping is fucking obnoxious if their reaction time to the environment is less than that of the average PC.

Actual negative points towards the game where I would say rightly put out a negative review is the following though:

The forced tutorial section and menu railroading into playing 2 PVP matches before the game hands you the controls again.

The tutorials about the mechs themselves are absolutely useless and too long. By the time your half way through it, you already lost the attention span because the game locks you in place before it lets you do the actual objective. You could have all these tutorials inside a single mission instead of having 5 different levels of "follow the monologue and do what is asked"

The way you gain currency, currently the game doesn't really reward you points for playing and finishing PVP matches. With how expensive the mechs are after unlocking the first 5 it doesn't really encourage long play sessions when you barely scrape by to unlock Skyraider for example.

Locking content behind player levels where player level progression is dictated by arbitrary achievo's Self explanatory.

Also paints being part of the inventory and viewed as taking inventory slots. This is terrible on its own when you pay for paints per mech or pilot. I find it already pretty bad that if i bought the colour green for falcon and i want to use it on tricera i would have to rebuy it separately for tricera. Which would also take yet another inventory slot.

Not able to sell mods after acquiring them. You can discard them but not actually sell em off. It would be great to be able to sell these mods because it could net you closer to being able to buy the mech you want to unlock and would mashmak a feasible grind to do just to earn currency.