It actually seems like a very refined gameplay, clearly they've been working on this for a long time and have put much effort into it.
Love the store, I see why the purchases are limited as people would relentlessly play and spam buy skill shards. Speaking of which, it's great they've added another method of collecting skill shards. Kudos again.
You're going to require a huge bank of talismans to do well in this arena trading characters on defence and attacking. It would be great if that weren't still a broken mechanic in the main game ->this is a massive criticism of mine, and it's still a dealbreaker for me. Some characters like samurai Eddie still need complete reworks of certain skills I feel. I love the fact that for your defence team you can make a full cheese setup and not have to play it lmao. And for the attacking team a full cheese setup will not get you to the top of the arena because it would take a loooooooong time for every battle ->but you can try every cheesey setup you would like providing you have the talismans.
Overall very solid addition to the game and it feels LONG overdue, I feel like if we'd had the arena on the initial release this game would have had a much more successful launch. I'm going to go out on a limb and say once the arena has a global launch, and we have less in game broken mechanics like the talisman upgrade materials, it should generate much more interest in the game. Lots of fun.