Recent reviews by ph?

I tried liking the game. I tried really hard (lvl 55).

There are some fun concepts, for example Sundance with the wingsuit, Dozer with the shield, playing Falck (Medic) feels rewarding; healing works well.
Great gunfight physics: Shooting, hits, gun balance feels all smooth now.
I can excuse a certain number of bugs regarding vehicles, movement and some specific perks for the moment.

The problem is that each modes' gameplay-design is individually broken.
To many bad decisions have been made regarding setup, maps and vehicles.
A quick example is TDM, shamelessly spawning you backwards in front of the opponent's gun countless times.
Battlefield 2042 is blatantly skipping TDM basics, that have been tried and tested since decades and are essential for enjoying a match.

Then there are the poster game-modes Conquest and Breakthrough:
The maps fail to find the dimension that can satisfy both, infantry and fighterjets alike (of course...).
If your squad doesn't have ambitious pilots, who can quickly reserve one of the few choppers or airplanes, that you could jump into the battlefront from, you will often find yourself forced to walk the entire map.
These long, tedious walks lead players into using vehicles just to travel to the front, abandoning them after arrival.
Effort placed in levelling and adjusting vehicles to battle efficiency is for nothing, since in the time of need, there will be none available.

Of course there are these few specific tools, that can mitigate the problem to some degree.
But efficiently bringing advanced tactics into play with 3 randoms in the squad and no voice-comms available, is just a very unrealistic expectation.

What is really missing in Conquest & Breakthrough, are carefully designed maps of manageable size without vehicles.
For example indoors, in a ship, a building, a village,
anything except these vast open fields of emptiness, where only large vehicles and snipers can persist.

If developed into a good direction, Everspace2 has the potential to become an essential landmark in the Space Looter/Shooter genre,
In today's state, the game would greatly benefit from a larger diversity of mission content and more variation of opponent ships and their behavior.
Understood in early access, where one can clearly see, that only two of the six (or possibly more?) solar systems are approachable.

Incredible. In the past years I have come to love HARD games. While all the main franchises - including the old 'scary' ones - form into one meaningless mainstream wash for kids, the niche for difficult, dark games remained to be fulfilled.
Resist or embrace.

The one complaint I always had with existing MOBAs was, that there is no point in having a strategic simulator view of the characters and indirectly clicking their walking path and attacks. SMITE solves the issue flawlessly, bringing real direct action into the MOBA genre.

The problem with SMITE for me is the matchmaking. I thought I felt, that they have a separate matching for the really low levels, but once I reached level 5 or so, which happened fast, I was matched against pre-mades of 5 with 5 solo queuers, or matched against players with hundreds of games played, as someone who plays his 20th round. This can't work. I also did have an amount of fairly balanced matches though.

Looking at past matchmaking on smite.guru makes me think, that the only matchmaking criteria is ELO. It is a huge mistake not to consider, that someone with 1000 games played and an ELO-1800 is at an entirely different level of playing than a player with 20 games played and an ELO-1800.
Maybe that would mean that the concept of ELO is flawed, or SMITEs determination process of ELO, but I just don't see it working that well. Obviously matching parties of 2 against parties of 5 can't work either.

If you can handle a hand full of frustration due to the slightly flawed matchmaking and a very beginner-unfriendly community, give SMITE a try. I would highly recommend reading up about the laning roles though, before you ever queue into "Conquest" mode.