One glance told me:
"Less is more."
Less amount of models ("Skirmish" is the new corporate buzzword to justify a bad deal), barely any terrain and an obnoxious price tag. And the models haven´t improved in any way.
Personally I find the new models are great, better than the 2017 models. It's this immediate churn of books once again that is very disappointing after the promise of only a couple required to play. It's clear they are repackaging the House books/Gang War books again.
The changes to weapons, cover, and range modifiers make Melta Guns the most accurate and most deadly weapons. AP is the new accuracy.
I like some of the ideas. M+d6 charge and d6 Engage action is great for boosting CC. But they did a failed fix for the already broken CC rules. Their fix was CC in Initiative order. Well chargers get +2 Initiative and reaction attacks are reduced to a single attack, so charging is even more important. They only thing it helps with is multiple combats.
They made pinning (suppressed) more common by removing a bunch of hit modifiers, but then removed the benefit of being pinned... going prone behind cover.
Bulging biceps is once again move-and-fire with heavy weapons, only this time initiative is used instead of move. And now nearly every gang can give a ganger Bulging biceps at the start of a campaign.
There are almost no weapon restrictions besides those imposed by model kits, and any model can change weapons now. This means min-maxing around the new semi-random advancement system will replace biying specific advancements. They ALMOST made XP and advancements better by enforcing randomness, but then chickened out and allowed people to take a lower result on their roll. And of course advancement cost still makes so sense when compared to fighter stats.
All these changes to Initiative and they forgot that it has no lasting injury, and didn't add one. At least Bionics don't bloat gang rating anymore. All these changes to Initiative and they completely divorced it from climbing and jumping. That's Agility now, a new non-stat stat, and everything has the same Agility except for Escher who are always slightly better, even better than Malstrain Genestealers (I assume, haven't seen Malstrain rules).
