I totally get the initial frustration, but I think the game is obtuse intentionally because you are a lowly uneducated grunt in the lore. You are meant to just figure it out on your own. That may seem like a lazy excuse, and it might be, but it’s a design intention. The tutorial is intentionally barebones and then your character is literally cryogenically frozen and then thrown into battle.

The not receiving the rewards is on the server side though. All day yesterday I didn’t receive any rewards, but today they all showed up. That is something that will get ironed out.

The punching in the codes I believe is a balance choice that is there to make it a challenge in the midst of battle so you can’t just spam orbital strikes when you know you’re about to die like most people do with grenades in FPSs. There is a lot of physicality to the game from reloading early making you lose the rest of your rounds, to being able to change machine gun rpms or to check remaining ammo (hold the reload button if you are unaware), to being able to sustain specific limb damage, among other things. In this way, the codes are a gamified version of a soldier calling in an actual air strike in war.

I’m level 11 now and have unlocked a fair amount of cool weapons and strategems. I’m still having a blast.