Long time player with several hundred hours on the standalone client. Buckle up, you need to know exactly what you are getting into.
To be blunt, Ironsight is a below average game. Don't misinterpret that or try to sugarcoat it. It is absolutely nothing more than a mediocre FPS with horrible mechanics, lazy devs, and greedy mtx.
When Ironsight first launched it got a lot of attention because they paid lots of Youtubers to shill the game. Anyone who saw those endorsements knows exactly what I'm referring to. People who would only play the game for 1 hour and then make videos about how "Ironsight is going to kill the Call of Duty franchise" or "Ironsight is the next big thing". Yea, not a chance.
I cringe when people try to compare this to Cod. If anything it is more akin to Black Squad.
Onto the game mechanics that ruin the game:
Snipers are king in this game. Much like other PC FPS games, snipers are grossly overpowered in the hands of skilled players. There aren't too many truly insane snipers on the game anymore but some are still around. If you go up against one of these people in a mode like SnD, you'll know it because they will wipe your whole team every round. There's nothing you can do to these people. You can only pray that they miss once in a blue moon and you get the chance to react.
NETCODE. This one is going to hit home for lots of people. The netcode in this game is among the worst of any major FPS. I mean even god awful games like Warface have better netcode. They have been struggling greatly to fix the netcode issues for several years now with no success. They've tried a few times to adjust it but have fallen short each time. Be prepared to lose lots of gunfights and be shot around/through walls and corners due to this. It's extremely difficult to tell when people are cheating in this game because of how bad the net code is. Did that guy actually shoot you through the wall like the killcam shows or are the bullets in that instance just so extremely delayed that they registered after you had rounded the corner?
I can't comment much about the anti cheat effectiveness due to the above point. I would say seeing somebody who is blatantly cheating like insta killing every one with one bullet is a rarity. However there are so many cases where you just can't be sure. The killcams can be really, really quirky and show absurdities that you really want to call cheats on when really it was just the awful netcode that caused things to seem the way they did.
Matchmaking. Since this game has been out for several years, you are going to see lots of people that are level 100+,200+, and 300+. These are people who play this game religiously and are typically extremely skilled. There never was much logic to the team balance. You can have 3 solo, skilled players in a lobby and have them all end up on the same team by pure chance. The skill gap in this game is quite massive. This isn't a game mechanic as much it is just the reality of multiplayer gaming. The maps, guns, and game take some time to get used to but you are unlikely to be given a break. Just like other FPS games, this game requires excellent reaction time, mouse accuracy, ma knowledge, and overall gunskill.
Footsteps are insanely loud. You thought Modern Warfare fudged their footstep sound, wait till you try this game. You can hear someone sprinting from damn near across the map with a good headset. I'm not sure if they changed since I last played but as I remember, crouching does not mask your footsteps. You can still be heard very loudly. This means that outside of going prone, there's literally nothing you can do to move silently. Among many other things, this completely kills any sense of competitive play.
Edit: Confirmed, footsteps are impossible to make silent.
Weapon variety is pretty bad. There's definite winners per weapon type for best gun and everything else falls short. Especially at the higher levels you will only ever see maybe 2-4 different guns being used.
The map design is hit and miss. It is designed so that you can not be sneaky or pull clever plays. Almost every map is on a strict 3 lane system. The middle of the maps are such that they are difficult to cross or even stay in without dying because you can watch mid from so many different angles on lots of maps. So it becomes a campers paradise in some situations. Some of the newer maps have more variety in their design but the original maps are tedious to play on. Once a team has control of mid map, good luck ever being allowed to leave your spawn.
UI: The UI as far as dealing with friends and people in the lobby is weird. You can't just click on someones name and do what you want to do, you have to manually search them up by their name (case sensitive) and do stuff from there. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to just right click on someones name in the lobby and have that bring up the menu of options.
Misc. Issues below:
The loot box system in this game is one of the absolute worst (if not actually the worst) of its kind of any major game you will ever play. You can literally spend $100 on loot box rng and come out with nothing to show for it. If you want something, buy it directly for a hefty fee. If you want one of the unique skins that takes a combination of other weapon skins, you are better off buying all the skins directly. Trying to chance them on loot box openings and you will easily throw away several hundred.
Graphics aren't anything to write home about but I won't knock them either. I'd say they are better than they are bad.
Finally, I want to say that in my experience and that of many others, these are some of the most incompetent, lazy developers you will ever come across. On the standalone client, it would take them months (6+) to fix or adjust even the tiniest issues. If I remember right when I played there was only 1 actual content update in an entire year and even then it was an awful limited time event that died overnight. Every filler update in that time was just cosmetics and pushing mtx harder and harder. This game was pretty much dead on the standalone client. It had a few dozen/hundred diehard players that still played every day but for the most part it was a ghost town. This game was teased to be released on Steam for several years now, it was heavily assumed that they kept delaying the Steam launch because they knew that the game would get crushed under the weight of negative reviews. Before it gets flooded with new players, take a peek through the subreddit for this game and go back a couple of dozen pages. That'll give you a good idea of just how many problems this game has and how negative the overall feedback has been for the last few years.
Pros below:
The only thing this game has going for it is the fact that it is a modern FPS. There are very, very few of these to go around. Black Squad is a weird game and the gun mechanics make it not competitive or similar to a CoD game at all. Games like insurgency and their hyper realism don't resonate with a lot of players. Battlefield games are their own class of game that CoD players don't like. People love CoD for a reason but CoD might as well not exist on PC due to them never being able to deal with the cheating issues. So for the past many years there hasn't really been any alternatives on Steam to fill that gap. This game does do that to an extent. While again, it is more like Black Squad than it is like CoD, it is built close enough to CoD to give players that close quarters FPS feel that they've been craving on PC for so long.
My final thoughts: This is not the next big thing. This is not going to be the CoD killer. If anything it will have a decently successful steam launch but I'd wager the player base will suffer a sharp decline after the first few weeks of hype wear off.
Edit: 6 hours in on steam, game is as awful as I remember it.
