[Game] Jagged Alliance - Back in Action

[[-project.rattus-]]

I have to say that fater playing the demo a while longer, it actually grew on me, and I have preordered it now. You just have to block out it's "jagged alliance" name, and play it like a quite good RTS/tactics game akin to commandos (allthough less puzzle-like)

 

[[-project.rattus-]]

So, I have bought it and here's my verdict of the first 2-3 hours of gameplay:

The Good:
- I like how you can customize the gear of every merc, down to shirt, trousers and shoes. even the portraits change depending on head gear equipped.
- It has the same kind of humour in the item descriptions (well, many are exact copies of the JA2 descriptions, but the new ones can be funny too)
- Despite it's RTS base, it plays very slow and tactical, much akin to the Brigade series
- You can sell stuff to merchants.

The Bad:
- The portraits look bad and are not recognisable for most mercs
- The animations are quite bad
- Cheap mercs don't want to sign up with you in the beginning. If you're far enough into the game that they will, you usually can afford better ones. Especially aggreviating with Spider, which I always started out with in JA2.
- No sidestepping/strafing. Makes offensive gameplay quite hard, especially since enemies can pinpoint you through walls.
- The new RPG system: no more levelling up skills and attributes by using them, but manually distributing points on every level up.
- No more placement of mercs when entering a contested sector.
- Items like crowbars, toolsets and medipacks have set times of use rather than a percentage, making small improvements in the needed skills less important.
- Voice Acting. Admittedly the originals were bad in that aspect too, but some mercs sound more stupid than ever. Especially Grunty, who, despite beign in a game developed by a german team, speaks the worst kind of german. Even ignoring the horrible english accent, most of his lines are grammatically incorrect...

The Ugly:
- No IMP, thus no custom merc.
- Merc roster down to 40, only AIM, no MERC (I miss you, Speck! He and Ivan were first the two mercs that I have hired in the original JA)
- No world map management whatsoever. You cannot rest, repair, heal or train. It's only there for travelling. Repairing and healing only work in sector view, and there are no wounds which need time to heal.
- The militia management: you no longer train troops for time and money on the sector screen. Now, in every sector recruits turn up randomly and you have to manually set them up with weapons.
- NO SECTOR INVENTORY! That alone makes equipping militia a pain in the ***. Especially if you have to get a weapon from another sector to them. Also hauling loot for sale is a pain.
- No fog of war. Honestly, what did the devs think? Not only makes it apparent how abd the AI is, it really makes the game a lot easier both offensively and defensively. No more cautiously approaching a building because you don't know what's inside, and no more carefully placing mercs in all directions, because you know from where and when the enemies are coming.
- The AI. Now the AI wasn't that good in JA2, but the turn based mechanics and not being able to see where eacxh one was at any time hid that. But here, both your mercs and the enemies constantly block each other's paths. Also, the Ai tends to forget where your mercs are as soon as you reload a save. I guess that's why saving during combat isn't allowed.

Verdict:
It has lots of shortcomings and is definitely a bad Jagged Alliance game. But if you manage to ignore the name and simply play it as a nondescript tactical game, it's still fun - Especially if you play it back to back with the atrocious JA: Online.

To compare it to it's most important competition:

It's way worse than JA2 1.13
It's way worse than JA2 Vanilla
It's worse than the Brigade series.
It's slightly better than Hired Guns.

 

[Apos]

So, I have bought it and here's my verdict of the first 2-3 hours of gameplay:

(...)

Verdict:
It has lots of shortcomings and is definitely a bad Jagged Alliance game. But if you manage to ignore the name and simply play it as a nondescript tactical game, it's still fun - Especially if you play it back to back with the atrocious JA: Online.

To compare it to it's most important competition:

It's way worse than JA2 1.13
It's way worse than JA2 Vanilla
It's worse than the Brigade series.
It's slightly better than Hired Guns.

I have same thoughts on BIA. Devs never learn that success in making remakes is to:
- take an old classic game that was great
- make new graphics, keep old gameplay and atmosphere, improve it with most common mods and add achievements
- don't screw it with bad voice acting, performance issues or other basic mistakes
- release it
- PROFIT!

At least BIA isn't another first person shooter that used to be great Real time or Turn Based Strategy/RPG/ game

 

[Blockbot]

Well, I never played this sort of game before. unless of commandos. which begins to go back several years so I dont really remember much.

first impression I got was "what kind of cheap **** have I bought"

but when I got through the bad intro, and the anoying tutorial. and into the actuall game. I felt it shined like a jedi doing a banana (which is a good thing, cuz who wouldn't want to see a "banana jedi")

first thing I saw was all the 40-50 mercs. and all of them had unique dialogue. like "steroid" which sounded like "swarchenegger". and "fidel jahan" which was a terrorist just perfect!!! and dont forget the whimpy medic "MD dawson" loved them all. its just such a big improvement from the standard starcraft, warcraft warhammer rts type of games. with their repeating "fire in the hole"

in the end I would rate this 8.5/10

only thing that I felt that was missing was more dialogue between the characters and quests. since the dialogue is allready super great. make it more epic wouldn't hurt. ofc making it a textbased image japanese junk like the new zelda games are not in the picture

 

[Blockbot]

hah I just won the whole game for a secound time within 14 days with melee mercs only xD

 

[NoxNoctum]

Anyone on here play UFO: Extraterrestrials with Bman mod? I heard the vanilla game is terrible but with the mod it's really good.

Silent Storm and Sentinels are two of my favorite games of all time but for some reason I just could never get into JA2, I think the lack of a destructible environment didn't help (i.e. blind firing at a sound contact through the floor of the attic, blasting a guy away who was peeking his head through the main door below you). Or just shooting a hole through a wall from outside with an MG and then having another character toss a grenade through. It just felt way more "alive" to me than JA2's combat.

Coming from that to JA2's combat felt pretty bland. I also preferred Silent Storm's leveling up perk system to JA2's strictly by the numbers system.

Are there any other games out the closer to SS's style or am I just out of luck? (at least until the new X-com game comes out which seems pretty similar in a lot of ways) (and ya I have Hammer & Sickle)

 

[Tomcat_ha]

so not a proper sequel of brigade e5/7.62 i see...

too bad i really liked both.

 

[RJ_MacReady]

Anyone on here play UFO: Extraterrestrials with Bman mod? I heard the vanilla game is terrible but with the mod it's really good.

I've played only vanilla UFO: Extraterrestrials, but I can't say that it was bad. I purchased it soon after it was released and it must have been a bit buggy, because the progress stuck at one point. Then some months later I realised I lost my copy somewhere, possibly after one of great spring cleaning activities, so I've never really finished the game. All I can say about this clone of X-Com is that it was the closest to the original amongst other productions like UFO: Aftermath/Aftershock/Afterlight, thus it was the best since Microprose times. The only minus of the ET was the lack of destructible terrain and the lack of randomness in maps. And those two things were the greatest pluses of the original version.

Silent Storm and Sentinels are two of my favorite games of all time but for some reason I just could never get into JA2, I think the lack of a destructible environment didn't help (i.e. blind firing at a sound contact through the floor of the attic, blasting a guy away who was peeking his head through the main door below you). Or just shooting a hole through a wall from outside with an MG and then having another character toss a grenade through. It just felt way more "alive" to me than JA2's combat.

Coming from that to JA2's combat felt pretty bland. I also preferred Silent Storm's leveling up perk system to JA2's strictly by the numbers system.

But speaking of JA2, it has destructible environment. You can blow a lot of walls or doors using mortars and by planting explosives, plus there's a chance for bullets penetrate trees and other stuff. Sure it can't compete with Silent Storm engine, but it does pretty well for a 2D game.
If you feel JA2 combat bland, you should really try 1.13 mod (http://ja2v113.pbworks.com/w/page/4218338/Features) if you haven't already. It enhances gameplay and tactics A LOT. It adds suppresion fire mechanics, aggresive AI behaviour (AI gets a general overhaul in both tactical and strategic modes), weather effects, weapon modifications. It completely changes the game. I highly recommend it.

Are there any other games out the closer to SS's style or am I just out of luck? (at least until the new X-com game comes out which seems pretty similar in a lot of ways) (and ya I have Hammer & Sickle)

Unfortunatelly I can't think of any other games similar to Silent Storm, although I've heard that one of JA3 will (or would? I'm not sure if the project wasn't abandoned) use the engine. And it is sad. If only SStorm developers walked a different route and instead of concentrating their efforts on introducing a story to a tactical game they focused on making it purely tactical and historical (=no dialogues, no Panzerkleins, just focus on combat+some background strategy-level management) like X-Com is, with completely random maps, and they documented the map editor properly, they would have succeed in making their title one of the most memorable in history of tactical games.

so not a proper sequel of brigade e5/7.62 i see...

too bad i really liked both.

Not only you. I really liked Brigade E5 (although wasn't able to lay my hands on 7.62 yet). In my opinion it's one of the most underestimated tactical combat games, possibly because it needs polish and greater budget. It has the best Real Time with Pause tactical mechanism (with corner shooting and stuff) I've seen, along with an absolutely marvellous adrenaline and stamina systems and the greatest amount of weapon modifications (as well as their perfectly detailed hi-res textures and their visual feedback on weapon models in game[!]) amongst all RTwP tactical games. Too bad E5 suffers from poor AI and is quite bugged. If only Apeiron had more cash when developing the game...

PS. Guys, sorry for grammar mistakes. I have a few cans of beer flowing in my veins.

 

[melipone]

Are there any other games out the closer to SS's style or am I just out of luck? (at least until the new X-com game comes out which seems pretty similar in a lot of ways) (and ya I have Hammer & Sickle)

I really liked Silent Storm, but only up to the point where the Panzerkliens come in, then I seem to get bored. Also don't like how you have to manually search the whole map after killing everything to find stuff or pick stuff up. Will need to get Sentinels some time, will do if it ever gets on GoG

You could try UFO: Afterlight (http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/ufo_afterlight). Has base/world management as well as the tactical side.

Desperados is supposed to be like a Wild West version of Commandos. I never got into either games at the time but might be worth a look (http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/desperados_wanted_dead_or_alive)