It's excellent
The pokemon availability (barring some oddities that I've seen being available in teasers for the next update like chimchar) is like a breath of fresh air compared to reborn, empire, and even the mainline games.
The difficulty is low enough that I don't need to play spreadsheet simulator and compare/contrast/plan out battle step-by-step with a list of the next big baddie's full team, moveset, field gimmick, etc. but still high enough that I can't just send out big nigger the level 100 charizard who's been winning every single battle singlehandedly for me like a mainline game. The lack of proper EV training spots (or easy access to my good friend mr. debug menu) is something that I'm sure will be fixed later on when it becomes more necessary to properly EV train your pokemon. The game hits the balance between being so hard you have to plan everything ahead of time and being so easy you can just blindly walk through without any thoughts very well, but it's ever so slightly easy enough that I had to restrict myself from using the pseudo-legendaries I have access to so far, or at least not IV max them / EV train them if I did use them. I've no doubt things will heat up as the updates progress though.
There are a couple things that bug me like some pokemon battle animations being really fast/goofy (honedge looks like a dog sniffing the ground), no soft resetting, the game opening links on it's own (thank you again for the edited map files, RG) that are ignorable issues/stuff that I'm sure will be polished later on.
I don't really have a strong opinion on the gacha, just wish the full list of available mons was more easily accessible.
The story took a bit to hook me in but it's got me and I really quite enjoyed it despite thinking a few story beats are clunky or silly. I'm actually legitimately looking forwards to the next update, something I haven't felt in a good long while.
As for problems:
There are so many long ass cutscenes and sequences that it's almost unbearable. When the cutscenes started getting longer and the control switched over to Derek and then Eda for the first time I really conked out and just started spamming the enter button to get back to the player character. Later on towards the end of what's playable I started appreciating the cutscenes more as I got more into the story but early on it's hard to care. Adding to that, there are small parts that could have been cutscenes but are player-controlled like getting out a cutscene and switching over to piloting the female MC rival so I can run from the bottom of the city up to the execution zone and watch another cutscene. I understand that it's a nice place to take a break and save and etc. but it seems like the developer went a little too crazy with it. Compound that with the lack of skipping text (not that I would, just in cases of resetting for battles and such) and I couldn't imagine sitting through the entire game again until maybe the full release.
This was all done with speed-up turned off after playing the entirety of reborn on 2x and then empire half on 2x speed and half on 4x speed, so take my complaints on the speed of the game with a grain of salt.
Also, there are several pokemon who's stats/etc. have been changed like Delcatty now being Fairy type, Ledian getting +60 BST, and probably a few others I completely glossed over. The game is sorely missing a list of changed pokemon, or at least having a type indicator in-battle so I don't sink a drain punch into a delcatty only for it to be not very effective.
Ultimately even if everything I disliked (dislike is a bit strong of a word, to bee honest) was multiplied by two it'd still be better than Reborn and most certainly head and shoulders above Empire.