Got into the closed beta, a bit ago. First impressions:
The gameplay is quite nice. When you're in the heat of combat and avoiding torps, trying to keep your aim on point, dealing with frequent fires and flooding, keeping yourself well positioned, etc. the experience is very enjoyable. This is really important, because if the core experience wasn't enjoyable this game would have no chance of being any good, regardless of development time.
Balance is not great, but for a closed beta it's more than acceptable. If you've played games like World of Tanks, you really need to shed your idea of how much tier matters. In this game, values do not scale much with tier. For example, a tier 10 destroyer has about the same hitpoints as a tier 2 cruiser and a smaller cannon than any tier 1. There is a tier 3 cruiser with more HP than tier 8 cruisers. You get the idea. When you tier up, the traits that increase are often "secondary" ones, not primary traits like HP or firepower. Maybe you gain some more AA capability, or your turrets traverse much faster, or your rudder shift time improves. Things of that nature.
Visuals need some help, and I hope that they improve that as time goes on. The land in this game is completely barren, there are no trees or buildings or anything at all, just rocks. Textures are quite poor in general. Some effects just seem missing. No special effects like rain, night, big waves, or anything of that nature.
Not all the garage mechanics are in the game yet, but the ones that are in are done quite well. It slowly opens up new things to you as you play, so at the start you don't need to deal with stuff like equipment and crew training, which I think is a big improvement over tanks. There's also bots that you can fight against (with other players as allies) that make for a pretty relaxing newbie experience. They are good enough to challenge a completely new player, but not good enough to beat them. As you get better, you'll quickly outgrow them.
Game runs very well. I've never dropped from max framerate, but considering that there's not much going on as far as visuals go, that's not too surprising. Had a tooon of issues with huge load times and terrible stuttering until I took the game off my SSD, though. Not sure why it doesn't like SSDs, but it doesn't.
I like it.