Played this a bunch yesterday with my day off. Two major observations (in additional to a lot of what has already been said). Now, I haven't played battlefield before, so I don't know if this is typical of DICE games or not:
-Not a whole lot of variety of the weapons. They all felt really similar to me and didn't get a great feel for each one. The only exception is the "rifle" that in the description says it deals heavy damage at long range, but the range rating is the lowest of all the weapons. Maybe if your'e shooting at a crowd of people from far away, because the accuracy is nil. More effective it seems due to the fire rate at close range. I would hope there is more variety, or add ons in the full game to add replay value.
-LOVE the fact there are no killstreak rewards. I found the games on walker assault were determined by who was playing for the objective won, even if the other side was just trying to play slayer. That makes it fun. If there were killstreaks, especially for the Empire since the Rebel spawn points are so bad, this would be a horrible game. I felt it was balanced well and while the Rebels have an advantage if played well, the Empire won a lot of games when they played for objectives.
(My) flying is brutal.
on Walker Assault, Empire was faceroll and Rebels had to actually work hard to win, I felt.
I agree on the lack of killstreak rewards being good. It's painless to die, you even keep the non-vehicle powerups through death, and you spawn almost immediately.
That last point is fairly good to keep the action going, but I was so angry playing on the pod map, our team was down by 2 and it would never balance nor did anyone have a way to switch teams. With the lack of a respawn timer, it was nonstop zerg rush by the team up 2 to the pod. We outkilled them handily but eventually you just can't take all the rush and they cap the pod.
Respawn timer of maybe 5 seconds would be somewhat useful.