Everyone is doing their best to obtain access to the closed beta of Riot Game’s new shooter, VALORANT.

(VALORANT in all caps is a thing, at least the devs of the game have requested it at some capacity on Twitter.)

We are pleased to tell you that we have been granted access to the beta and have played about 5 matches of the game so far.

With a win and loss record of 2 to 3, we’ve been on all sides of the best of 13 round marathons.

Here is what we think of the game at it’s first impressions, what game we think it is closest to resemble for interested readers, and improvements we’d like to make if given the chance to offer those to the devs.

The training facility for the game is great. You can shoot targets with varying adjustable difficulties including but not limited to strafing bots. In between the rounds or on the fly during the rounds you can interact with your mouse sensitivity settings by shooting the “dashboard” of your shooting “pit”. This clever way of not placing the player in and out of gameplay and still being able to receive player input for settings is ground breaking in our opinion and may end up not being noticed in the grand scheme of the game’s news.

It’s details like this that make you really appreciate all the hard work gone into a game for just it’s beta release. Which makes us believe we are very near the completion cycle of the game and they are probably going to end up keeping beta’s live and soft booting the game in a similar manner to which they introduced their other two recent games, Team Fight Tactics and Legends of Runeterra.

So if you still haven’t been granted access to the beta, more than likely an open one will be coming soon. Other rumors circulating on Twitter seem to corroborate this guess.

Once you’ve got your training in and understand the three basic abilities on keys, C, E, Q and ultimate ability on the X key for a few champs it’s time to find a match.

The reason we recommend researching these in the training tool is because when you end up joining a match you will be in a pregame lobby you may end up being forced to play a different character than you had planned. This is similar to other character based games that only a certain amount of each character can be on the field for each team.

So try to lock in the character you want to play with or end up with your 2nd or 3rd choice based on your speed.

The match will begin and your team’s objective is to either defend two areas where the “spike” can be planted by the other team, or to deliver and plant your team’s spike in the enemy team’s areas.

During the round you only have one life. You can prepare for that round by purchasing a weapon and/or abilities for use during that round. If you live through the end of the round you will be able to keep the weapon moving forward into other rounds. However if you die before the end of the round you will not maintain access to your weapons and will have to purchase them again at the beginning of the next round.

The shield can be kept between rounds but it does not replenish damaged shields. You must purchase a new shield to restore it to 100% health. Abilities are kept until used once you purchase them. Your ultimate is charged up during play by eliminating other players or by interacting with the objectives.

You may pick up free counters towards your ultimate ability by picking up dark spheres in certain areas of the map. These can be key in making a play for a clutch round or for planning on a certain round in the future.

Half way through the best of 13 round match your team’s will switch sides. At the beginning of the last round of the first half the announcer will tell your team that you must use all of your money because everything will be lost at the end of the round.

The second half of the game starts the same as the first, with a pistol round. This system is the most like CS GO and really is the only major comparison with the game we can make with honesty.

You have to remember that we’ve been playing video games since the beginning. Many people have different positions of origin playing video games since it spans so many generations now, over 5 decades!

The games decor and colors and balance are much more like Team Fortress than any other game. This makes sense since the art director for the team is the same art director from Team Fortress.

Even though the characters have abilities that is just a slight coincidence to Overwatch as really the two games are completely different. In Overwatch you are a fighter, not usually with a shooting weapon, and if it is a weapon it’s unique to that character. In VALORANT your weapon can be the same weapon used by your teammates and your opponent, and you are not limited to which weapon you use on your character. This is a major difference in the games in my opinion, add in the difference in level design and its hard to compare the two games in honesty.

So what game do we think the game is most similar to? Call of Duty Black Ops 4. If you really had to take all the categories and break them down, these two games have the most in common. Both have unique characters with their own unique abilities, both normal and ultimate. Both have a pool of shooting weapons anyone can utilize at any different combination. Both have a game mode of attack and defend or search and destroy.

It seems that the only thing that users have been really vocal about so far is that there is a character called Raze which has several deadly abilities. For instance she can shoot a Rocket as her ultimate and it can kill everyone in a small area. For one of her abilities she gets a one hit kill robot that searches out enemies like a roomba looking for dust. Another of her abilities lets her throw up to two deadly molotovs. Her last ability lets her throw a deadly cluster grenade.

Only a few of the other characters have such deadly abilities while really none of them have a full set of abilities that can also kill the enemy. This has caused some frustration among players playing against a Raze character who have voiced that frustration on Twitter asking for nerfs or reworks to be done.

Riot has been super transparent and very communicative to the player base using their various twitter accounts and community employees. They have responded that they are looking into balancing and tweaks for all players as the data is collected from the beta.

Other than that the only thing we can add is that the matches are a bit long. We think the hardcore will enjoy the marathons but for the casual gamer we think the first team to 9 round wins would be a fine adjustment.

We hope you are having fun playing the VALORANT beta or that you get a chance to play it soon!