Initial experiences: It's very obviously in beta. This isn't the Simcity Beta where it's like "oh it's already pretty polished just some minor detail glitches here and there", this is like "oh my god my framerate is fluctuating as I run around, but standing still is perfectly fine". Oh wait, that was the entire second game.
While the game looks much prettier and less "edgy" than the previous, it certainly feels the same in terms of performance (if not worse). However, this is a beta, and it's likely things will improve as graphics drivers are further optimized and the game engine is further optimized as well (the beta was ran on Nvidia's latest beta drivers which were told to give huge performance boosts).
Otherwise, initial experiences were great aside from the fact that I had to start from level 1 all over again like a loser. The suit energy system is completely redone, with Armor and Stealth getting their own energy bars and all of movement (sprinting, jumping) is just infinite I guess since there was no energy bar for that. Armor can now be a passive suit mode, similar to the first game, but still must be toggled (can be done automatically with a nanosuit module), and will only drain when actually hit. Stealth is pretty much the same.
Hunter mode is an absolute blast but it needs just one little tweak: turn off kill/death whatever cam once you get killed by a hunter. There's two loving minutes, Crytek. Every second is essential and honestly I don't give a stuff HOW I died, just throw me right back into the action. Otherwise it's pretty fun to literally be an infinitely stealthed nanosuit, and satisfying to survive a round as CELL.
Then for whatever loving reason, every other person in the game became better than me. I started sucking, my lack of food since 11 am probably drawing from my head, whatever.
I promptly quit the game in frustration because I don't have a red dot sight because everything from the previous game's multiplayer is null.